These questions aren't useful for evaluating pg's work (or frankly that of most PL implementors) because it concerns things, like syntax, libraries, user culture, etc., that is outside of the rather narrow domain Atanassow cares about.
He believes languages are utterly defined by their type systems, saying in the LtU comment you linked: "Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl and Lisp are all the same language". I'd assume that he would say the same about js, lua, etc.. AFAICT, he's quite knowledgeable about PLT, formal methods, static typing, category theory, etc., but he disregards
everything else.
It's worth considering whether he is right to do so. A waspish answer is to observe that companies built on languages he deems to be "in the corner" (c, java, dynamic languages) constitute the entirety of companies with significant market capitalization, and ask (apologies to Aaron Sorkin) "If your type system is so smart, why do you lose so always". A better answer is to note that a bunch of stuff that he deems trivial (generally anything outside of the type system, but specifically libraries, syntax, bindings to existing systems, etc.) matters, so javascript is different than python despite being identical in his eyes. Specifically, js runs in the browser and has a pretty good runtime for building web services, while python has exceptional ecosystem support for data science and machine learning.
He believes languages are utterly defined by their type systems, saying in the LtU comment you linked: "Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl and Lisp are all the same language". I'd assume that he would say the same about js, lua, etc.. AFAICT, he's quite knowledgeable about PLT, formal methods, static typing, category theory, etc., but he disregards everything else.
It's worth considering whether he is right to do so. A waspish answer is to observe that companies built on languages he deems to be "in the corner" (c, java, dynamic languages) constitute the entirety of companies with significant market capitalization, and ask (apologies to Aaron Sorkin) "If your type system is so smart, why do you lose so always". A better answer is to note that a bunch of stuff that he deems trivial (generally anything outside of the type system, but specifically libraries, syntax, bindings to existing systems, etc.) matters, so javascript is different than python despite being identical in his eyes. Specifically, js runs in the browser and has a pretty good runtime for building web services, while python has exceptional ecosystem support for data science and machine learning.