The Eclipse foundation announced today the availability of Xtend, and improvement on the Java language, that remains compatible. See the video below, and check out the Xtend website to see for yourself, how Xtend embraces Java, while improving it readability and adding a number of nifty features, some of which programmers like in Smalltalk, Perl, and PHP.

Xtend Intro from Xtext Team on Vimeo.