Why another programming language?
There are several things that Kogut does that other programming languages don’t do as well, so Marcin thought that a new language was needed. Kogut is the first language to call itself a “functional scripting language”, and it truely deserves that title. Kogut combines the functional paradigm, ie. minimization of side effects and first-class functions, with a scripting language, which makes it easy to write small programs. Other scripting languages like Perl, Python and Ruby, while good for writing small scripts, were imperitive and inconsistant. And functional languages like Haskell or SML were bad for making small programs and had other problems (SML feels hackish, Haskell is too puritanical).
