Renaissance

Some believe the future will be about languages. They believe that:

Thanks to the plateau of per-chip performance increases and the resulting need to work better with multi-core CPUs, the relative difficulty of mapping user requirements to general-purpose programming languages, the emergence of language-agnostic "virtual machines" that abstract away the machine, the relative ceiling of functionality we're finding on the current crop of object-oriented languages, and the promise and power of productivity of dynamically-typed or more loosely-typed languages, we're about to experience a renaissance of innovation in programming languages.

On the other end of the spectrum, others believe that the most important paper for programming language designers to read today is one written by two social psychology professors in 2000. This is the well-known academic study, "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire too Much of a Good Thing?". They believe that vast majority of choice of dialects can only damage our business.

Well, though I can relate to the renaissance wave I can certainly understand that we cannot scatter our investments over too many languages. We desperately need new languages to solve new needs, but we each of us doesn't need to know a bunch of languages that serve the some such needs.

One thing is to know a little about a bunch of languages, but to know a language in depth requires much efforts.

My point is: we'll have to embrace new languages - most of the ones we presently use are loosing traction, but let's not scatter too much our language pallet: we wouldn't want to raise a new Tower of Babel.

And in the mean time let's be pragmatic: for most of business and organizations, the responsible way to adopt this new paradigms is just to beef up their current languages - most of this organizations have too much knowledge built around the previous concepts, the solution must be evolutionary, not revolutionary...

Give this, I will be as incoherent as I'm normally am and will continue to learn as many new languages as I can :)