Bob Harper is known (among my circles, anyway) as taking pretty hard stances in favor of first-principles approaches, and he's also one of the foremost research

Bob Harper is known (among my circles, anyway) as taking pretty hard stances in favor of first-principles approaches, and he's also one of the foremost researchers in advanced type theory. Python is about as far away from his interests as you can possibly get, I'd imagine. > Academic functional languages don't have most of those, and academia has no right to complain given that they've done little to rectify this. On this note, I'll have to (hopefully politely) ask you to learn a bit more about what you're going to talk about before offering such opinions. Most (maybe all?) modern languages were developed primarily as direct results of academic involvement. And in those areas in which the influence is not direct, advances are usually still due to the efforts of those in PL academia. I don't say this to be obnoxious, but you can pretty well trace the developments through conference proceedings over the past few decades. As for what we refer to as academic languages: they are not meant to be useful to the general programmer. They don't need powerful standard libraries or flexibility. They're meant for exploration and experimentation. Haskell (for example) was never supposed to catch on in the mainstream. It was designed to answer questions like "What does programming in a lazy language look like?" and "Is such a language useful?" and "In what ways is it not useful?" This is detailed in the phenomenal paper "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class" from I think HOPL 3.