Can you elaborate on where the hole is? Jeff Bezanson's thesis work on Julia was undoubtedly PLT, as were some of the other folks at the Julia Lab now (e.g. Shuhei Kadowaki). Keno Fischer is very much into all things PLT, as can be evidenced by his work on Diffractor (see this ACM SIGPLAN presentation [1]). Ditto for James Fairbanks and all the people working on Catlab.jl's [2] ecosystem.

Where I do agree with you is that PLT awareness has not permeated the entire community as much as I'd like to see. Certainly one feels a need sometimes to push back against increased "Matlab-ification" of the language. However, it is also nice to see a direct line between rather theoretical concepts like abstract interpretation and very practical use cases like GPU computation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQnSRfseu0c [2] https://github.com/AlgebraicJulia/Catlab.jl [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_interpretation