Been looking into this recently so leaving it here as friendly competition: https://air.mozilla.org/ur-web-a-simple-model-for-programmin...
Ur/Web is really great, but not at all general purpose.
Why am I hung up over "general purposeness"? Well when I learn a language, it takes quite a bit of my time; then I want to be able to apply it broadly.
Therefor I shun Node.js, Go and Erlang/Elixir.
Can you explain?
I like Go since the beginning. However, Go cannot be easily used for kernel development, soft or hard real-time or embedded systems (no linker script support and porting runtime is weighty) and there are few transpilers.
Rust is slightly better, because PoC kernels have been put together with fewer hacks. Haskell, C, Ada, assembly are much more general purpose in terms of being able to build something like seL4, an F-15 cockpit, an engine management system or compiling code as ASIC circuitry. (Perl's supposed use in nuclear armaments notwithstanding.)
PS: I would like to see some geninuses come up with a back-back-end to LLVM or a disassembler which could formally prove binary satisfiability of program correctness without mind-bending, gibberish, over-mathematized, incantations inaccessible to us mere, stupid mortals.
I'd say a language is general-purpose when it has not been tailored to a specific scenario or area of problems, but to work well for most. Isn't that, to a great extent, true for go?