in these days, news from the arena of programming languages only reminds me how people can easily get excited over trivial things.
empirical and theoretical. many and many big volumes of trivialities are produced. and not necessarily easy to be learnt.
life is very short. time spent to learn a new, so called, fundamental innovation in programming languages, could be better spent elsewhere.
learn chemistry. learn economics. there're many whole world unknown to me. watch another japanes anime or tv series. they teach me more than old Alan Kay or old Guy Steele.
lisp or unit testing, i'd better spent more time with my life partners.
don't take me wrong. i like collecting programming languages. to this day, i've collected some of c, of course, and scheme and forth and c++ and java and python. and a little bit of perl and ruby and ocaml and clean and erlang. and even less so with a few more bizarre ones.
i've also collected some programming practices, such as literate programming, and such.
it's a difficult thing to say. it's like you asking me if i support the death penalty. i just can't give a quick answer.
but i do dislike people give easy answers in the face of real difficult questions.
there ARE real questions in the field of programming languages research.