Lambda the Ultimate

With 2008 winding to a close, here's a question to you: what was noteworthy about 2008 as far as programming languages were concerned? To paraphrase Ehud, on topic are notable news about PLT research (direction, fads, major results) (2) notable news about programming languages (whether about specific languages, or about families etc.) and (3) notable news about industrial use of languages/language-inspired techniques (adoption, popularity).

While we're at it, let's score the predictions made at the beginning of the year and laugh at how young and naive we once were or at least make excuses about why our foretelling didn't quite pan out as predicted.

Subject line pretty much says it all - type systems as in ML, Haskell, Scala, etc.

I've tried comp.lang.compilers and comp.lang.functional to no avail. Help me Obi Wan, you're my only hope :-)

If this is not PLT enough a topic, I'll fully understand if the moderator deletes it.

Otherwise, many, many thanks in advance.

Scott