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> it probably can't hurt to work on something new without dragging along all the baggage of the past

Ignoring a century of relevant research is not a recommended scientific approach though. The "baggage of the past" are rather the "shoulders of giants".

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I mostly agree, but many scientific communities are rather self-centered/inward-looking, and when it comes to technological innovation like programming languages, it could be a reasonable compromise to align slightly more with a "mainstream" ecosystem and slightly less with the academic community. Of course, ideally, all design choices are compared to the community's state of the art, but this may be impractical if it implies a comparison to tens of obscure languages.

All three authors are computer scientists. It even seems to be a cooperation between academia and industry .

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