> It's a little dismissive to pretend that other language designers, eg. those of Python, Kotlin, haven't done their years of research

Different features have different levels of depth in languages - as mentioned, where it is only a frontend compiler level change, it definitely didn’t require as much background knowledge as Loom.

Hell, Ron has been working on this exact problem for close to a decade, if I’m not mistaken! Kotlin is barely a decade old!