The JVM has become the playground of the programming language researchers. This is a good thing for the Java community, even for those of us who mainly uses the Java language on a day-to-day basis. It's nice to know that the language that I write CRUD applications is also capable of being so creatively used.
I like object-oriented programming. I also like functional programming. I'm not allergic to LISP's nested parenthesis. I've been looking at Clojure for the last year, and believe it has the potential to becoming the next big language.
Functional programming survived all these years because of one thing and one thing alone: It's mathematical—It's fundation can be presented as axioms, definitions and theorems. Object-orientation, on the other hand, feels ad hoc. It may map well to how some people view (the object/attribute/governing-rules view in the Aristotle tradition) the world. But psychological studies has shown that not all people (the community/relationship/harmony view in the Confucian tradition, for example) perceive the world that way.
Although I'm not certain about what the next big language is, I know what the next big thing is. It has to be something for the Internet. It has to be something that beats Google at searching results. Google is good at relatively simple and static things, like "From which direction does the Sun rise?", but terrible at dynamically changing things, like "Where is the Social Security Office at Creve Coeur, MO?" (They used to be on the first floor in the building OCI is in. They moved a couple of years ago. But we still see people coming to the building to inquire.) I know it's not going to be easy, but what if Google start to get some opinions and display a "We think this is good" or "We think this is wrong" marker alongside every search result. Sort of like fact checking for every web page.
JavaScript is the lousiest language ever invented. It is unfortunate that we are stuck with it for now (the web-era). It needs to grow. Some people want to make the browser a platform, fine. That platform needs to grow. In growth, it will see fragmentation ("which JavaScript framework library are you using today?"), consolidation and evolution. At the end (we are talking about five to ten years out) it will be just like one of the other platforms that we use: Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
Ruby and Scala are both languages with weird syntaxes, just like Clojure is. But the mark of a truly useful language is that people will learn it in order to get things done. People seems to forget how hard object-orientation is when they first learned it. The same thing can be said of JavaScript.
Tomorrow's big language is today's obscure or nonexistent language that someone finds powerful enough, innovative enough and pleasant enough to do interesting things with. Have you solved a real problem lately? Have you enjoyed your programming work lately?
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