If Clojure and Scala are popular on the JVM, then why not F# on .NET? And you can write F# code in Emacs, as God intended.
> Why not more effort porting an existing language to the CLR?
It didn't work very well. The mismatch between your favorite language and .NET caused 2 problems. First, the procedural/OO style required to interop with .NET bled into the rest of the program. Second, performance sucked for dynamic types, tailcall, small object allocation, etc. The result was you'd write a program in your language that looked similar to C# but ran 2X slower.
Scala and Clojure get around this by being new languages that try to match the JVM platform better. Plus they provide fat libraries so you don't have to see Java objects too often.
> F# is cool, but C# 4.0 does not seem to lack much, feature-wise.
C# doesn't have algebraic data types, pattern matching, currying, active patterns, metaprogramming, asynch workflows and global type inferencing. There's more, but you see my point.
I've expressed exactly this point to many people involved in C#. Partly, they do not appreciate that most PL features can be implemented as libraries in more powerful languages. Another part is they understand that blub programmers are interested in features, not libraries. Being popular means appealing to the masses.
If a language does not have closures nor more complex control flow features, you really can't implement PL features as equivalently easy-to-use libraries. IMHO, that's why most mainstream languages continue to add superficial features rather than fix the core problems in their PL.
I did write a thesis on macro hacking and embedded languages, and it wasn't theoretical enough to be useful. The stuff I had for the compiler's phase ordering problem was done better by other people.
I had the same eureka moment reading The Economist's science section. The articles are usually old info, superficial and misleading. Then I read an economist's blog post complaining about the same thing in their finance section. So I assumed the entire magazine was suspect and stopped my subscription.
I worked on similar stuff in grad school. How can I get in touch for more info? Thx.