Academia, in my experience, has a tendency to use more theory-heavy languages (Haskell, OCaml, and of course Lisp), or the "easy-for-engineering" languages, like R or Matlab. When I used to work for a university, our stuff was done almost exclusively with Haskell.

This is fine, but a lot of academic work (bioinformatics, video processing, advanced statistical analysis, etc...) can be very computationally heavy, leading to a lot of academics and post-docs writing some ad-hoc C++ in order to squeeze out better performance.

What I was suggesting is that, since Carp might have better performance characteristics for more CPU bound tasks than something like, say, Racket, it might satisfying the niche of academic-friendly languages.