My ideal programming language would be a language where the IDE stores the tokenized result of the code entered as an s-expression instead of the text itself, so that I could then change my syntax settings and compiler settings to allow it to syntactically work like (almost) any other language, and the displayed code would be updated to match those settings.

That way everyone working on a codebase could have it appear to them with their favorite language syntax style and formatting.

According to my boss, the ideal programming language would allow him to scribble things onto a piece of paper, rub that piece of paper really hard on his screen, and presto; programming!

Coincidentally, the idea of there being a consensus on an ideal programming language is just as likely to occur.

I believe this is quite an open ended question. Its almost like asking people - "What would be your ideal music? ". While everyone in the world - after hearing a music / song - will be able to tell you whether they like it or not - They wont be able to tell you what their ideal music is. Mostly because they dont know.

On a side note : A Programming Language is a User Interface - and the best User Interface is the one that is invisible. So, an ideal Programming Language is the one that is mostly invisible.

I think Nim is really really closed to it. If it could add more dynamic features, meta programming.

And if there was a Hexagon Graph on programming languages, it should draw an Hexagon at the 80% region, it isn't the best for everything, but you could use it in any scenario without heavy compromise.

F# with C# syntax. Something like Scala for CLR but with proper tools and compiler-as-a-service.