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On Thursday, 8 September 2016 at 10:18:36 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:
> I am certainly hoping that Chapel will be the language to 
> displace NumPy for serious computation in the Python-sphere. 
> Given it's foundation in the PGAS model, it has all the 
> parallelism needs, both cluster and local, built in. Given 
> Chapel there is no need to look at C++, D, Rust, Cython, etc.

I can see where you are coming from, I have taken a look at 
Chapel and high performance computing is their top priority. I 
think they hope that it will be the next Fortran, but I think it 
is very much a domain specific language. They have clearly given 
plenty of thought to distributed computing, parallelization and 
concurrency that could yield some very nice performance 
advantages. However Python's advantage is that it is a dynamic 
language and can act as a front end to algorithms written in 
C/C++ for instance as Google has done with TensorFlow. In the 
future it could even act as a front end to Chapel since they now 
have a C API.

However, I feel as if computer programming languages are still in 
this static-dynamic partnership, e.g. Python with C/C++, R and 
Fortran/C/C++. It means language overhead always maintaining code 
in more than one language and always having to amend your 
interface every time you change something in one or the other. In 
essence, nothing fundamentally different is happening with 
current new languages. I hate to sound like a broken record, but 
what Sparrow proposes is a unification in such a way that all 
kinds of overheads go away. Making something like that work with 
the principles of Sparrow would be a revolution in computing.