After promising I would restart Minnow quite a lot has happened.

During the time I was developing early versions of Minnow, I was also experimenting with Haskell and C++ and really starting to see what generic programming could be like.

Coming to understand generic programming made me frustrated with Minnow’s lack of these facilities, but I knew I didn’t have the know-how to build them in and do it well. In pursuing this, I met a professor in the generic programming field, which led to begin a PhD in programming languages.

This has left Minnow a bit stranded. It really needs proper generic programming facilities as well as more robust parallelism[1] if it hopes to be any kind of use in the coming years. I’m was never comfortable releasing 1.0 until it had both. I was not sure when that would be, nor what Minnow will look like by then (experiments with ChaiScript, Factor and others have made me rethink Minnow syntax as well).

As they say in the cult of done: If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. This might mean that Minnow is abandoned, but (very!) likely, a new language will emerge in its place.

(1: Message passing is only useful at one level, languages like Clojure and Go really show that you need to be concurrent at different granularities)