Could anyone who's got knowledge of the environment explain why a new language was required - what couldn't have been done as a library for an existing language?
If you're interested in a Python implementation of some of the core ideas of Swift (task-based parallelism, DAG representation of work-flow, etc..) look here: https://github.com/timarmstrong/pydflow
A new language isn't required. For part of my dissertation, I wrote a DSL on top of Python called Weaver (http://bitbucket.org/pbui/weaver) that compiles workflow DAGs that are executed by Makeflow (http://cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/makeflow) on a variety of distributed systems (e.g. Condor, SGE, WorkQueue, multi-core).
A friend of mine is finishing up his compilers class and keeps randomly wanting to write new languages because he can. It would not surprise me to learn a similar effect is ...in ..effect... goddammit my diction sucks today.
