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

This is a really broad question, about on par with asking "which fashion houses are putting out daring material and what will Dior be making that's popular 30 years from now". Software is just like any other cargo-cult industry where trends rise and fall almost like clockwork. From Rails, to Angular, to React.

RE: People/Groups who are researching 'new approaches to programming' - you have the typical universities putting out papers. Conferences like POPL and ICFP tend to be where most of the major academic work gets put out. From within the industry, commercial entities aren't really doing much, bar Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK, not MA). They're really pushing the envelope with regards to strict PL research. www.rise4fun.com to see the dozens of projects they're putting out. Oracle, too, is surprisingly doing some interesting work.

30 years is a hard guess, but 5 years you'll certainly see: 1) a lot more emphasis on concurrency, at 14nm we're rapidly approaching the physical limitation of transistor density (which is why you're seeing 18 core Xeons). Sharing memory is notoriously hard, so the move towards immutability (whether it's pass by ref const in 'traditional' languages like C++ or more esoteric languages like Haskell, that's the direction it's going in, whether by using the actor model, STM, etc) 2) Especially with Intel's Knight's Landing. RDMA has been around for ages, but bringing it to Xeon means the common-man doesn't have to pay Infiniband prices for HBAs. RAM has been getting cheaper but imagine being able to just deck out a 42u filled to the brim with ~18 2u's of half a TB of DDR4 RDIMM a piece that your main application can access. 3) Disks, which used to be a huge thrashing bottleneck (who here is old enough to remember thrashing on GCC 2.95 when trying to compile E17?), are now posting amazing numbers, even for SSDs.

Effectively every level of computing that used to be a barrier (minus SRAM and the CPU caches which seem to have been stuck at the same spot for a while in terms of capacity) has, or will within 6 months be consumer accessible. I couldn't guess what's going to happen in 5 years. I can't even guess what's going to happen in 5 months and I've been at this nearly 20 years.

I think you may have lost the forest for the trees. For as broad of a question as this, the different web frameworks you listed are all just that - web frameworks. That is just one area of programming, and the differences between each framework are trivial in a multi-decade view of things.

What is more interesting is your points towards hardware limitations, and that seems like more of an area in which such a question would have meaning. I tend to think less about what we will code, and more about where that code will run, and how low/high level it will be -- Will we still be coding to browsers in 30 years? Will firmware still be a black box for most people, or will your average joe start to play in that realm? Will coding be a specialty, or will it be as pervasive as knowing how to read and write? If everyone on the planet could at least code to a basic level, and all devices had at least a minimal API to configure, what will that even look like? Will Legos have embedded code, so 4 year olds can assemble blocks and do robotics instead of just static toys?

I have no idea on any of those answers... but those are examples of the kinds of questions we should be looking at, not whether React or Angular will have more longevity, because frankly, in 30 years, very little of what we are doing today is going to have any relevance.

Lamdu: http://www.lamdu.org

Alan Kay’s Viewpoints Research Institute: http://vpri.org/ (with which Bret Victor is associated).

Viewpoints Research Institute, see e.g. http://vpri.org/html/writings.php which has papers like "Checks and Balances - Constraint Solving without Surprises in Object-Constraint Programming Languages" and Alessandro Warth's "Experimenting With Programming Languages" (which led to OMeta/JS, which is I think on GitHub), as well as a ton of Alan Kay talks on fundamental new computing technologies http://vpri.org/html/words_links/links_ifnct.htm .

The way that Datomic uses Datalog is really interesting from a perspective of "new approach to programming" (databases).

Erik Demaine's course on advanced data structures gives some interesting ideas for time-travel-based games: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/spring14/ . His work also has application to other fields like creating an efficient in-app version control system http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~ecprice/papers/confluent_swat.pdf .

Lots of cool stuff on HaskellWiki; for example https://wiki.haskell.org/Functional_Reactive_Programming .

If you really want to jump into the deep end there's a whole blog called Lambda: the Ultimate about new approaches to programming: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/