ncm: Today I was going to be so busy that I couldn't compose an Advogato entry, but then you wrote:
Continuing to follow up, note this from the conclusion of the BitC paper: "It is noteworthy that none of this effort was deemed fundable by the National Science Foundation (which is to say: by the academic programming languages community)." Mm-hmm. All BitC needs now is destructors and exceptions. If they can avoid any analog of "finally", then, they're home free. :-)I asked Jonathan Shapiro about what he made of the complaint of Bjarne Stroustrup's that you had reported; I should think you would be interested in his response, where he says [t]he effect that Bjarne describes is real, but I don't think it's a matter of bias on the part of academics.
Now I guess I have to spend more time dealing with outstanding points! On Friday, you wrote:
I have the advantage of having no desire whatsoever to preserve existing Haskell code, nor Haskell coding conventions, nor favored Haskell idioms, nor even laziness-by-default. I'm talking about a language that preserves the fundamental strengths of Haskell-like languages (which does not include their built-in Lispy data structures), adds the fundamental strengths of C++ (most particularly the destructor), and stirs in enough practicality to make the language industrially useful.I'm guessing that BitC is a better starting point for the kind of things you think might be good about Haskell than Haskell is, especially if you have doubts about the value of monastic discipline. So I'm pleased to see you say earlier today: Following up, Bitc looks like it could become quite interesting.
Having plugged BitC, I still think that Haskell is the world's greatest language laboratory for many reasons. Monastic regions, in particular, could be of interest because region inference is, in essence, rather like using type inference as a basis for automatic inference of constructors and destructors. Add some decent instrumentation to this, improve Haskell's built-in runtime costs, and perhaps you might find the result useful.