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I would prefer a conference about emerging features in languages, since many languages only differs in superficial aspects. Is better to located what new features are needed.

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There were a number of talks in that vein. Rich Hickey's talk about his experimental "pod" feature in Clojure for safe scoped mutation, Joe Pamer's talk about making F# suitable as a first-class .NET language, and Jonathan Shapiro's talk about the correctness constraints guiding BitC's design all focused more on problem domains and the features necessary to fill those domains than superficial language features.

I'd estimate that only half of the languages presented were of the sort that differ only in minor aspects. Several of the languages presented were _far_ outside the mainstream, particularly the two visual languages which were surprisingly practical.

On the whole I'd say factor was likely the most unconventional language besides those mentioned above. The breadth of libraries they have built while being so iconoclast is impressive.

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