I'm rather excited about Nimrod, it actually looks a bit like Scala (pascal-style declarations). Scala has a lot of appeal for (most) organizations where the JVM is very widely used. I guess I tend to look at things from the position of a software engineer rather than from a teaching perspective. I'm really hoping that Nimrod gets a lot of traction (don't want it turning into a D).
* (Mostly) Python-ic syntax (indentation-based)
* Type inferance
* OOP (but only when you want it)
* Good expressivity
* Compiles via c (FAST, easy linking with C libs, no runtime required, prodoces standalone binaries)
* Lean core (Not a "kitchen sink" language, but has good support for FP and OOP)