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Comment by buff-a | Hacker News Reader

>Programming language research is a very large and deep field

I agree with you. But to play devils advocate, if its so large and deep, why do I only hear about Haskell and Scala when language-geeks talk about "advanced" programming languages? Looking at the wikipedia link you provide, there's a list of bullet points by decade: 7 things worthy of a bullet in the 60's, 7 in the 70's, 4 in the 80's, 2 in the 90's and 0 in the 00's and 10's. Has nothing interesting happened lately? Is Haskell as good as it gets?

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"Is Haskell as good as it gets?"

It's debatable just how good Haskell and similar languages are. Like any language, it has its ardent fans and bitter detractors.

As for development of "advanced programming languages" in general, if you are interested in what's out there, I strongly recommend you browse the archives of the "Lambda the Ultimate" weblog:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

There are a lot of very knowledgeable language designers on there, and news of advanced language features and new languages filters through there all the time. The blog is not as active as it once was, but the archives are still very much worth studying.

Another great resource is the old c2 wiki. Here are some relevant starting points:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?search=haskell

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?search=lisp

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?search=scheme

Finally, just hang around HN for a while, and you'll see plenty of posts discussing new "advanced" languages. The HN archives are also worth browsing through.

No, it is not. The deeper I get into Haskell, the more references I find to esoteric research languages like Agda (which itself is still pretty big compared to many others). The thing about Haskell is that it is probably the most "researchy" language that is also practical to use for general purpose programming.

Really? Haskell and Scala are sooo last century. Look up Agda or Epigram. ;-)

Seriously, though, it takes time. Lisp had higher-order functions and garbage collection long before they became mainstream. The type systems used in OCaml and Haskell were discovered in the 70s. Maybe in 10 years we'll see what of the 90's ideas become really valuable (or crappy but mainstream...).

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