Darren New wrote:
> What comes after Object Oriented?

Only time will tell, but my guess would be language features to help the 
compiler understand how to efficiently run a program in a highly 
parallel or even heterogeneous environment.  This has already started to 
a degree as there are now multiple programming languages targeted to GPUs.

It's not clear to me if this will require a major new programming 
paradigm to solve or if it can be shoehorned into existing techniques, 
but it seems like the best bet for what's next.  Also, I suspect that 
"everyone starts using pure FP" will not be the way in which this 
happens, although maybe some FP ideas will pay a role.


> Why has programming language development been functionally stalled for 
> 30 years?

I suspect it's because we reached the end of the low-hanging fruit in 
language design which also has a high payoff.  This is actually a 
somewhat testable hypothesis, since if it's true we should expect to see 
an increase in the development of useful tools to assist programmers 
(IDEs, source control, testing, collaboration, etc.) dovetailing  with 
the decrease in useful language developments.

I still think it's an interesting question if there's any really useful 
unexplored language paradigms (in fact I think there are), but I think 
the question is more fruitfully answered by considering both language 
advances and programming tool advances.

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