It doesn't even always produce sane error messages right now :)
It also misses a bunch of syntactic sugar that make programming inconsistent from what one would expect in a bunch of cases (they acknowledge this up front).
Past that, in part, getting people to adopt new languages is about either providing them an ecosystem that is amazing to start and trying to convince them to jump ... OR meeting them where they are now (IE building integration into existing editors, tooling, etc).
Usually people try to get people to jump. You'll note that this rarely works and is a very long and slow burn when it does. This is true even when the new ecosystem is huge. The successful jump cases are usually somewhere in the middle, where they are leveraging existing ecosystems but providing something better enough.
Futhark is neither providing a better ecosystem to jump to, or meeting people where they are.
Insightful and reasonable, thanks! In particular, I agree that the error messages could probably do with a few hints of what to do next. I find Elm's work on user-friendly error messages rather inspiring.
Editor integration would definitely also be interesting. I suspect the best approach would be to implement the language server protocol, as there are too many editors to handle all of them individually.
The hope for Futhark is that a "jump" will be much smaller than for other languages, since it's not really supposed to replace any language, just to augment existing ones. It should feel more like using a library than adding a new language to a project. Of course, there is still a compilation step, but if necessary, that can be crudely circumvented by simply adding the (portable) code generated by the Futhark compiler to source control.
So, the strategy is definitely to meet people where they are - building an entire ecosystem is not really feasible for such a small and specialised language. Most people don't even have the problems that Futhark tries to solve, which is certainly a nontrivial hindrance to usage.
It also misses a bunch of syntactic sugar that make programming inconsistent from what one would expect in a bunch of cases (they acknowledge this up front).
Past that, in part, getting people to adopt new languages is about either providing them an ecosystem that is amazing to start and trying to convince them to jump ... OR meeting them where they are now (IE building integration into existing editors, tooling, etc).
Usually people try to get people to jump. You'll note that this rarely works and is a very long and slow burn when it does. This is true even when the new ecosystem is huge. The successful jump cases are usually somewhere in the middle, where they are leveraging existing ecosystems but providing something better enough.
Futhark is neither providing a better ecosystem to jump to, or meeting people where they are.