> It should not be too hard to marry the good parts of major language families It is. Language features generally aren't isolated modules that you can add and

> It should not be too hard to marry the good parts of major language families It is. Language features generally aren't isolated modules that you can add and remove freely: they interact, and "the good parts" are only good because they play nicely with everything else. You can't have Lisp macros without Lisp (or otherwise homoiconic) syntax, or Haskell's concurrency without its effect tracking, or global type inference with Java-style inheritance.