One reason Lisp has survived so long because it is capable of absorbing so many of the good new programming ideas as they come along. (No, it's not perfect this way, but it's pretty darned good.)
One reason Lisp has survived so long because it is capable of absorbing so many of the good new programming ideas as they come along. (No, it's not perfect this way, but it's pretty darned good.)
I think there is a great need for a multi-language framework, because different languages have such disparate power depending on what you are working on. I keep on thinking back to Rob Pike's Google Tech Talk on Newsqueak. He spends 6 months developing a language that does concurrency at a high level. After that, he writes a windowing GUI system in two hours.
What we need is the ability to support disparate language semantics and glue them together easily. It would be great to be able to model your business logic in Smalltalk, but write the GUI in something like Newsqueak.
Maybe Richard Stallman's original idea with GUILE was on the right track?