Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability. In order to explore breakaway approaches to improving programmability, the Fortress design has not been tied to legacy language syntax or semantics; all aspects of HPC language design have been rethought from the ground up. As a result, we are able to support features in Fortress such as transactions, specification of locality, and implicit parallel computation, as integral features built into the core of the language.