but i also just spent quite some time looking for a substantial example of usage and had to give up. the only thing close to that are the unit tests. and the language has been in development since late 2011.
that's somehow dispiriting.
that, in a nutshell, is the unfortunate situation with some of these interesting modern programming languages.
If you're not in the market to run supercomuting projects, you'll likely never use this language.
If you are, there's a very high chance you know about it already.
Sharp divide between those sides.
If even half of those are true, why wouldn't I want to use it for every program I write?
(Easy answer: it looks like most of those are still simply "aims", and not actually that close to being true.)
The main disincentive to doing so today is that Chapel is not nearly as broadly adopted or well-supported as the languages you probably do use in practice today. The Chapel team is trying to get it to that point, but it's a modest-sized team taking on large challenges (both technical and social, as this thread indicates). To date, we haven't made a significant effort to draw in a massive/mainstream audience because we know we're not ready for it yet, either in terms of the language's maturity or our ability to support a large group of users. But we hope and intend to get there.
That said, I think we're already achieving the aims in the slide you quote—far more than your easy answer suggests—though there's obviously room for differences of opinion (e.g., what does it really mean to be "as programmable as Python?"). If you're interested in pointers to supporting details, let me know.
I'll definitely put Chapel on my curious list.
Other recent notable examples include using Chapel for Dark Matter simulations [3], tree-based search algorithms [4], and CFD simulations (to appear at CHIUW 2020 [5]).
Your point is taken that the Chapel webpage could be better at pointing to such examples via a "powered by Chapel" section or the like.
[1]: http://www.clsac.org/uploads/5/0/6/3/50633811/2019-reus-arku... [2]: https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/ArkoudaForPuPPy-presen... [3]: https://github.com/mhmerrill/arkouda
[3]: https://github.com/sourceryinstitute/PAW/raw/gh-pages/PAW-AT... [4]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-22734-... [5]: https://chapel-lang.org/CHIUW2020.html