Does Python-like simply means uses python indentation? I was expecting something closer to Python. So it's not quite Python (easy to read, executable pseudocode) and it's not quite Lisp (real macros).
Well, they use ':' and indenting for defining blocks, but they also seem to have taken the 'nonlocal' keyword from Python 3000.
Also, I haven't looked too deeply into it, but my assumption is that classes in Converge are implemented similarly to Python.
They've borrowed a bunch of ideas it seems, but aside from multi-line lambdas and the "macro" facility, they seem to have changed syntax for the worse. ':=' for assignment, using what have become standard bitwise operators for logical or and logical and--those types of things turn me off right away.
It doesn't seem sensible to me to imply that every programming language has to have the same syntax as what came before it: no syntax is perfect and future generations won't thank us if we don't improve things when we can. Using "=" confuses new-comers to programming who think it's some form of comparison thingy. Converge doesn't have logical "or" and "and", so the & and | operators (taken syntactically and semantically) are there to point that out (although, in general, they operate in analogous fashion to "and" and "or"). In this day and age, having special syntax for bitwise operators seems odd: they're so rarely used that moving them to functions / methods and reclaiming & and | for other purposes seems reasonable.
Converge is a full meta-circular system (based on ObjVLisp), and at the VM level is actually prototyping based (the VM doesn't really know about classes). So classes seem superficially similar to Python but are actually quite different. You can see this as new objects are created via Object.new() rather than the Python-esque Object(). The object system in Converge is simpler and more consistent than Python.
