Yes, I asked him a similar question a while back when I was investigating the language. I recall the response was something along the lines of that he wrote the

Yes, I asked him a similar question a while back when I was investigating the language. I recall the response was something along the lines of that he wrote the language primarily for research into type-safe web APIs, and the language's features were a means to that end rather than an end in themselves. This is unfortunate because as a language it's one of the most exciting that I know of, but like you I have little interest in web apps. In fact with its current compiler (AFAIK) it can only be run as a web server, which means it's not even possible to write a program which just writes Hello World to stdout and exits. This was frustrating enough to me that I soon gave up on the language. :(