There was a project at Lawrence Livermore National Labs where many years ago they went down this path for scripting and controlling very large numerical calculations.
The second stream of material that is going to come out of this project is a programming environment and a set of programming tools where we really want to focus again on the needs of the newbie. This environment is going to have to be extremely user-friendly.
If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls.
If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.
Mark Hammond is working in this area, with Windows Scripting Host. It is definitely an area where Python fits almost perfectly. That's quite independent from Java, actually.
Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.
