Lambda the Ultimate

Hi there, I've been reading LtU for a while now, but I finally took the plunge and registered. I'm mostly self-taught and I can appreciate the quote by Dominic Fox on the Policies page. Hopefully, at worst I'm a newbie and not a wannabe. Anyways, I'm working on designing my own language, and I've actually settled most of the design choices, even started writing up parts of the compiler front-end.

Before I finally start setting things in stone though, I wanted to step back and make sure I'm not missing anything. I think it's interesting that the past few stories have been more about the "pragmatics" (if I can sneak in a linguistics term) of languages: adoption, tool-support, an active community. I found the comments to the story on R really interesting especially starting here.

I think Dennis Ritchie's advice on not expecting to become a superstar is apt too, but I figure if I'm going to put a lot into this project, shoot for the moon, right? When it comes to adoption though, I think Peter Gabriel's "Worse is Better" makes sense. Needs either arise or remain that other languages don't fill. It's almost evolutionary, where a new niche opens up and the first language into it, even if it's far from perfect, gets the opportunity and support to adapt.

I've read a lot of opinions that handling concurrency well is the current big hurdle to clear, but I've also read a few logical arguments that concurrency is a hyped issue. I'm far from the most experienced or smartest about this so I was wondering if anyone, based on their own research or work, had a different opinion on what the great, unfilled niche is. My own impression is that a toolchain and primitives that help simplify parallelism over data and air-tight security are actually stronger needs (like E?), but I could see concurrency being valuable for real-time systems.

Obviously, I'm going to make the language as complete as possible, but there's a point past which you just burn yourself out. If there are any articles or papers I should check out, I'd really appreciate it. Besides that, I hope this isn't too long or off topic, and I look forward to being part of the site.