> Scala has come from Academia, Industry, and Hobbyists.

That's an interesting point. The slide implies there will be no next great programming language because academia nor industry nor hobbyists can deliver it, but overlooks the possibility of a combination working together. For example, Rust started as Graydon Hoare's hobbyist language and then development was sponsored by Mozilla.

Yeah this comment stuck out to me in the presentation. Industry has a great record of creating + supporting languages. C#, F#, Dart, Swift, Rust, D are all languages that are actively supported by industry, and some were even created by industry too. Just seemed like a weird statement for the slides to say that new languages just aren’t going to appear.

If anything, almost too many of them. In the esoteric language area, every new language takes away from libraries for other ones as the communities get spread out. I do think the spread of ideas from that setup is good though.

But how many of those languages include substantial innovation? To me they seem to be mostly rehashing existing technology with slight cosmetic tweaks in order to serve the profit interests and ego of their creators.

Now, whatever innovation this proliferation of languages may bring, it also brings fragmentation which acts as a counter-weight on the value created for the industry as a whole.

Whether the net effect is positive or negative is very difficult to tell.