The art of programming is evolving steadily; more powerful hardware becomes available, and compiler technology evolves.

Ofcourse there will be resistance to change, and new compilers don't mature overnight. At the end of the day, it boils down to what can be parsed unambiguously, written down easily by human beings, and executed quickly. If you get off on reading research papers on dependent types and writing Agda programs to store in your attic, that's your choice; the rest of us will be happily writing Linux in C99 and powering the world.

Programming has not fundamentally changed in any way. x86 is the clear winner as far as commodity hardware is concerned, and serious infrastructure is all written in C. There is a significant risk to adopting any new language; the syntax might look pretty, but you figure out that the compiler team consists of incompetent monkeys writing leaking garbage collectors. We are pushing the boundaries everyday:

- Linux has never been better: it continues improve steadily (oh, and at what pace!). New filesystems optimized for SSDs, real virtualization using KVM, an amazing scheduler, and a new system calls. All software is limited by how well the kernel can run it.

- We're in the golden age of concurrency. Various runtimes are trying various techniques: erlang uses a message-passing actor hammer, async is a bit of an afterthought in C#, Node.js tries to get V8 to do it leveraging callbacks, Haskell pushes forward with a theoretically-sound STM, and new languages like Go implement it deep at the scheduler-level.

- For a vast majority of applications, it's very clear that automatic memory management is a good trade-off. We're look down upon hideous nonsense like the reference-counter in cpython, and strive to write concurrent moving GCs. While JRuby has the advantage of piggy-banking on a mature runtime, the MRI community is taking GC very seriously. V8 apparently has a very sophisticated GC as well, otherwise Javascript wouldn't be performant.

- As far as typing is concerned, Ruby has definitely pushed the boundaries of dynamic programming. Javascript is another language with very loosely defined semantics, that many people are fond of. As far as typed languages go, there are only hideous languages like Java and C#. Go seems to have a nice flavor of type inference to it, but only time will tell if it'll be a successful model. Types make for faster code, because your compiler has to spend that much less time inspecting your object: V8 does a lot of type inference behind the scenes too.

- As far as extensibility is concerned, it's obvious that nothing can beat a syntax-less language (aka. Lisp). However, Lisps have historically suffered from a lack of typesystem and object system: CLOS is a disaster, and Typed Racket seems to be going nowhere. Clojure tries to bring some modern flavors into this paradigm (core.async et al), while piggy-banking on the JVM. Not sure where it's going though.

- As far as object systems go, nothing beats Java's factories. It's a great way to fit together many shoddily-written components safely, and Dalvik does exactly that. You don't need a package-manager, and applications have very little scope for misbehaving because of the suffocating typesystem. Sure, it might not be be pleasant to write Java code, but we really have no other way of fitting so many tiny pieces together. It's used in enterprise for much the same reasons: it's too expensive to discipline programmers to write good code, so just constrain them with a really tight object system/typesystem.

- As far as functional programming goes, it's fair to say that all languages have incorporated some amount of it: Ruby differentiates between gsub and gsub! for instance. Being purely functional is a cute theoretical exercise, as the scarab beetle on the Real World Haskell book so aptly indicates.

- As far as manual memory management goes (when you need kernels and web browsers), there's C and there's C++. Rust introduces some interesting pointer semantics, but it doesn't look like the project will last very long.

Well, that ends my rant: I've hopefully provided some food for thought.