>>29
Just because it's not for "Hello World" applications or simple utilities doesn't mean it can't be mainstream.
See R for example.
http://www.r-project.org/
The continued search for a better general purpose programming language that is easy for stupid people to understand will be a fruitless endeavor. Things have already peaked. There isn't going to be anything really better than Lisp or D or Go or Scala, etc. Any improvements will be minute and incremental. And we can't expect hardware to help us here. We aren't going to get much faster clock cycles, and even if we do, we'll again find ourselves stuck once again. We're up against the fundamental limits of the Universe.
The real bleeding edge of computation isn't going to be anywhere near general purpose programming languages for humans and won't be ever again.
We have to fundamentally move beyond where we're currently at now to scale things up to run in parallel. We need to think about how data is physically situated in our hardware, about how far it has to travel to be transformed by a processor... close at hand from a cache, or do we have to load it in from disk or secondary storage? It matters, because it costs power and time just moving it from one location to another. We need to find ways to most efficiently work with our data in the real sense.
And we need to manage complexity in fundamentally different ways as well. Alan Kay has some good ideas here with parser combinators and PEGs, in which you build a bunch of DSLs that fit your abstractions elegantly using tools that make it very easy to do so, but also keep things tied to fundamentals: everything is data and functions that transform that data, nothing more.
None of that object-oriented crap, that stuff is a total mistake. Object Oriented Programming is Computational Marxism.