That's kind of one of our explicit design goals with Gosu, honestly: we're not trying to set the world on fire with something no one's ever seen before, but we are trying to make sure that eventually we have a language that is A) has the "good" qualities of Java (whatever you characterize those as), B) is close enough that it's an easy transition for people, and C) provides useful improvements on Java (type inference, closures, first-class scripts, some kinds of metaprogramming). In other words, we'd like it to be a no-brainer for people to prefer Java over Gosu, even for people who really like Java and are scared of, say, Scala or Clojure (let alone some non-JVM dynamically-typed language). Hopefully we'll get there some day . . .