I broadly agree - lots of hype and a bewildering array of features, but no reason to use it unless you are some kind of academic or lucky enough to be in the ri

I broadly agree - lots of hype and a bewildering array of features, but no reason to use it unless you are some kind of academic or lucky enough to be in the right kind of job for playing with general purpose high level languages. In my world (job) you either have to squeeze every possible cycle out of the innermost loops or get new hardware land on your desk which has an assembler and C compiler, maybe even a buggy, unfinished C++ compiler if you are super lucky. This probably sways me heavily against having an especially deep interest in all of these newer languages... I guess there might be some appeal if you are stuck with having to write code which targets JVM. Real programmers write Fortran anyway, right? (j/k obviously they write C++ [j/k]) :)