When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?
apu: Alan Kay has been asking this question for a long time now. His "Viewpoints Research Institute" is doing some interesting work in this direction.http://vpri.org/One of their projects is to see if they can build a complete software stack -- from the OS through the GUI and networking/graphics libraries to end-user software -- all in 20,000 lines of code total.They have already made some major progress in the past few years. I highly recommend reading (or skimming) their progress report from last year. In addition to being quite impressive, it also has several cool ideas that I had not seen directly before:http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf