One of the most interesting programming language approaches that I've seen in the last 10 years (in fact, I think the only new one in that time - comments please if you can think of others) is the work of Jonathan Edwards; a language called subtext. He presented a very early version at last year's OOPSLA and has developed the idea further. I can't really describe it well - it's based on a model that Nat Pryce compared to excel. At first I didn't get what he meant - it's got nothing to do with the grid nature of excel. It's the fact that it's always evaluated - there's no separate edit and run time. State changes are handled by having hypothetical future states - you can see what the state of objects are now and how they were in the past and how they would be in the future if you executed subtext's equivalent of procedures. I can't really describe it very well - have a look for yourself - it's different to anything else that I've seen.
Posted by ivan at October 22, 2005 11:02 AM