Well, every language is a product that has to compete with other languages. Nothing to do with composability or advancements in out-of-touch research areas. An

Well, every language is a product that has to compete with other languages. Nothing to do with composability or advancements in out-of-touch research areas. And these days languages compete on a lot of things, on performance, reliability, security, productivity, on syntax, on tooling, on libraries, on deployment and supporting infrastructure, on interoperability. Syntax is not even that big of a deal, it's not hard to compete on it, you can just take Go's approach or you can do it thoroughly and properly, not forgetting about newcomers, their likely previous experience and designing the whole learning experience into the language too. You can't leave it as is though or it's going to be a huge disadvantage.