Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

http://vpri.org/index.html

...and STEPS:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

"We set a limit of 20,000 lines of code to express all of the “runnable meaning” of personal computing (“from the end‑user down to the metal”) where “runnable meaning” means that the system will run with just this code (but could have added optimizations to make it run faster). One measure will be what did get accomplished by the end of the project with the 20,000 lines budget. Another measure will be typical lines of code ratios compared to existing systems. We aim for large factors of 100, 1000, and more . How understandable is it? Are the designs and their code clear as well as small? Can the system be used as a live example of how to do this art? Is it clear enough to evoke other, better, approaches?"

That's where you lost me. ;)

(It's sort of like a physicist claiming force, mass and momentum to be the hottest new research areas for the coming 30 years...)

http://kayia.org

Conal Elliott's work on Tangible FP was an interesting attempt to unify functional and "visual" programming that has been mostly abandoned: http://conal.net/papers/Eros/ Hopefully some of its ideas may yet survive in other projects.

The Berkeley Orders of Magnitude project is somewhere at the intersection of database and PL research, aimed at handling orders of magnitude more data with orders of magnitude less code: http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/ The Dedalus language in particular is interesting, as it integrates distributed- and logic-programming: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-17...

Joe Armstrong's thoughts on a module- or namespace-less programming environment are interesting: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...

I've been meaning to write a blog post about the convergence of various ideas of what the future of programming might look like for a while now, so I have a bunch of notes on this topic. The OP & other folks have already mentioned most of the other projects in my notes - in particular Unison, Subtext, Eve, & Bret Victor's work.

My current line of work is on tackling a tiny little corner of what I see as the future's problems - trying to find a better way to combine database/relational programming and functional programming. My work is here (but the docs are almost entirely in type-theory-jargon at the moment, sorry! feel free to shoot me an email if you have questions): https://github.com/rntz/datafun