Lambda the Ultimate

in 2002, Todd Proebsting delivered a talk about "disruptive programming language technologies" (video) He suggested that certain ideas, when integrated into programming languages, would make those languages slower, but much more useful, and would lead to the eventual displacement of older and faster languages. The technologies he listed were:

• Parsing (not regexes)
• Undo
• Tracking program state
• Constraint solving
• Concurrency
• Database operations
• XML manipulation

How has the landscape evolved since then? It seems to me that really large or really flexible programming languages could integrate these things in libraries. There are certainly parsing libraries in C++ and Haskell, for instance, and Haskell hackers have spent a lot of time trying to integrate XML and database operations into the language.

Other languages are designed exactly for these things that Proebsting mentions: XML manipulation is prominent in CDuce, XDuce, and Scala, and in the LL2 video Proebsting proposes Erlang as a solution to the concurrency problem.

Questions:

1. The Next Big Thing might end up being Ruby on Rails. Does it fit with Proebsting's thesis?
2. What other languages are filling the gaps suggesting by Proebsting? Will any become the next big thing?
3. What other disruptive technologies have you seen in programming languages since 2002?