The Future of Programming Languages

A co-worker and I got into a discussion about the new features of C++0x and I got to thinking about where we are going with programming languages. I think there's only so much farther that standard procedural or object oriented languages are going to go. The next thing is going to be a new wave of distributed computing programming languages, something that will have language features to support MapReduce and a new kind of parallel programming. Maybe it'll be Sawzall. I read the paper, but I have a hard time thinking in terms of how to write code with it. Hopefully whatever comes along won't require that much of a change in how we think of programming. I never really got the whole Lisp thing. I'll re-read up on Sawzall and see if I can better understand it the second time around.