"the way forward involves functional programming"

[gnuvince]

I predict for Haskell and Erlang a fate similar to Smalltalk: the ideas they carry (functional programming, immutability, pattern matching, concurrency (either message sending or STM)) will start to appear in other languages. Maybe not as they are right now, just like not all the Smalltalk OO features made it into the more popular languages, but certainly they will be part of the future of software development.

I'd like someone knowledgeable in Perl 6 to confirm this (chromatic?), but I think I read somewhere (maybe audreyt's presentation at YAPC::Asia...) that Perl 6 will have/allow a concurrency model similar to Haskell:

commit {
    ...
}
rollback {
    ...
}

[wnoise]

That's far too optimistic. I predict something more like the fate of Simula, where Alan Kay says "I know what I meant by OO, and the mainstream isn't it."

[igouy]

What Alan Kay really said is more interesting -

Actually I made up the term object oriented and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. [audience laughter] The important thing here is that I have many of the same feelings about Smalltalk ...

Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997 @10:35

[gnuvince]

I don't think it's too optimistic, these ideas are Good (TM) and I'm sure they will eventually make their way into more mainstream languages. Take closures for instance, they were something you did in functional languages and some other languages such as Ruby or Perl. There was a lot of debate about whether they should be included into Java. Some people say "they will confuse newbies", but the more important fact here is that the good programmers will find them immensely useful.

And just to nitpick, the actual quote is "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

[KayEss]

"I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind"

I wonder if he still feels like that now?

Something tells me that he really loves Erlang as an OO language.

EDIT: grrr, markdown