The Nice Programming Language

“Nice” is a Java-like language (with a horribly generic name) that can be compiled to Java VM bytecode and run on any Java VM.

Cool features:

• Option types. (See the Nice manual section). Though this feature isn’t completely general (you can’t have String??, the handling of type parameters is kinda hackish), it’s a good start. They’re limited by their desire to interoperate easily with Java.
• Multiple dynamic dispatch (AKA multi-methods, multiple dispatch). Motivation.

There are a lot more features that you should take a look at. There’s a lot of stuff from functional programming languages.

Nice can infer types for local variables. You need this feature.

Also, they’re still trying to come up with good constructor syntax (though it looks like they’re allowing Java’s syntax for now).