When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
cpr: What's funny is that even all the latest trace-compiling (V8, TraceMonkey) and JIT-ting (lots of others) implementation technologies for dynamic languages date from the early 80s (the Schiffman-Deutsch JITting Smalltalk compiler, specifically).Though there was also a fair bit of Self optimization work going on at the same time--don't know if Alan's and Peter's work was the very first of its kind.