Mushrat Goals

Best-in-class opening/reading/writing files

Best-in-class file searching (think Ripgrep and The Silver Searcher (and Ack))

Best-in-class string manipulation

Golf-friendly (language terse, very fast to enter)

Able to navigate colossal text or binary files without issue

Ultra-fast (interpreter fits in CPU cache as a goal? consider JIT?)

Self-learning environment (via context help, TUI "visuals", etc.) - see also microworlds

Version 1.0 would be stable and have ONE definition - so no AWK/sed implementation difference nightmares

Version 2.0 would be 100% backward compatible (warts and all) with 1.0, etc. - no Python 2 vs 3 nightmares

Find/replace on HUGE text files

Loop through records (like AWK) to extract data, but the language supports more than just one level of loop support!

Common (but strangely difficult) text manipulation tasks like stripping ANSI escape codes made both simple and easy