No, we can't. Not for reasons of feasibility of engineering problems, but for political reasons. We'll stand by the sideline, the coming decades, and watch how the Greenland ice sheet begins melting, as the political in-fighting goes on, contributing another 6 meters to sea level rising.

Don't care if it's recursive descent or not ( having noted the somewhat high-nosed, arrogant tone of your answer ). I want a grammer. BNF, EBNF, whatever. Anyone into compiler construction and wanting to / trying to use your language would want a grammar.

Agree with your remark on the number of whiners, wholeheartedly even. Yet, any message should be tailored, in form and in content, to its potential public; a thing that, I think, you treated a bit lightheartedly. Moreover, if you want contributors, "steering" is going to bring you nowhere. If what you want is the open source paradigm, then give up steering. If you absolutely want to steer, then give up on the whole open source idea. Speaking from experience here.

Descubes, did you think of putting up a formal grammar for your "language"? E.g. one in BNF ? Or a grammar readable by a widely-used parser generator tool such as ANTLR ? Seriously... !

This is not going to do your project a lot of good. You author the post, and put it on Slashdot, being lucky that you got on the front page. From that point on, it is *very* counterproductive to interfere with the discussion yourself. As other commenters already pointed out: you appear to have a vested interest in your subject, which - in the minds of many /.ers - influences the discussion in an unwanted, "steering" sort of way. Don't be surprised if your post goes into the history of Slashdot with a low number of comments. Next time, refrain from interfering. Good luck.

- most strangely and remarkably - seems to only happen in the USA. Why ?

"Plausibly" ? So a theory that takes interstellar travel and the pre-existence of humans on some other planet, light-years away, is more plausible than on-site i.e. on-earth evolution ? And where then, dear sir, did those humans come from who brought their eggs and sperm to Earth ? If not from evolution, then you face an endless recursion backward into time. And if from evolution, why could evolution not have happened on Earth ?

Well, if you like fallacies, then we should send dead women. "dead" being an equal state for both women and men, if a woman eats less than a man, a dead woman eats even less than a dead man, right ?

Second this, and mod parent up into the heavens. I have been using Julia for number-crunching ( trial factoring large numbers, finding Fibonacci primes, large matrix multiplication, PageRank on large graphs => eigenvalues on very large matrices ), and Julia is simply brilliant. The two guys behind the project seem to be working day and night, bug fixes are very very fast, speak 1 week. Julia runs on LLVM, is lightning-fast, and has a rather coherent design. A colleague ( researcher ) of mine is still on Matlab, as she has simply no time now to learn Julia; hearing her curse Matlab is as frequent as lunch breaks.

Holy shit !

Are there actually people still believing that Bushian crap ? Obviously, yes ( at least you ). Up to the next interventionist war which will cost the already-bankrupt US a trillion dollars. Well done, well done.

That is a blatant case of techno-optimism, and a surefire recipe for failure.

1) a protocol

2) sufficiently wide approval of said protocol

So how do we get that ? In our world, there are five ways to build systems: a) technoloy-driven ( done by the Gyro Gearlooses of our world ) 2) purpose-driven systems ( MS Office et al., ain't gonna work here ) 3) sociotechnical systems ( may work here ? ) 4) politicotechnical systems ( basically, things like the entire Internet, or national highway networks ) 5) open source systems ( seems to be the best candidate here ? )

The country I live in is not perfect, true. Although, not having reached the same level as not-perfectness as the USA, in spite of its population's tininess, it beats said USA by a couple of horselenghts. I live in Austria, BTW.

Do you really believe that, as you have an NRA and a gazillion of shotguns all over the country, you are capable to keep your own government in check ? Then, how come that all those rifle-toting and hard-working rednecks did nothing to prevent your own government from 1) spying upon you 2) running your federal deficit up wazoo, to the point of being, as a state, virtually bankrupt 3) losing three major overseas wars ( Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan ) in a row with your own money ?

Good point. The French revolution began in Paris, with its - for then - record-high concentration of poor people. So did the communist revolution: it began in St. Petersburg. Not on the countryside. LA, what are you waiting for ?? ;-)