I believe that the academic programming language community is more relevant than you think it is. It's where a lot of ideas get their start, and where live proj

I believe that the academic programming language community is more relevant than you think it is. It's where a lot of ideas get their start, and where live projects get discussed, leading to future evolution. Still, you're right that I don't expect that to lead to a lot of big changes. The set of really important languages is actually pretty fixed. We're still using C++ how many decades later? I think TFA is more concerned about the genesis of genuinely novel languages, than the practicalities of what languages are being used. From a PL design point of view, a lot of the languages we use are pretty much the same thing over and over. The differences are of immense interest to working programmers, but the range is really quite limited compared to what's possible.