Ask HN: When was the last really transformational idea in programming languages?

Javascript's design owes a lot to Self. Modifying an object's slots in realtime was pretty much the whole point of Self and what lead to the concept of a prototype language. (Well, technically, I think Self was simply an implementation of the already-existent prototype language idea... but is an idea actually useful before there's an implementation of it to test theories with? Chicken-egg... :))

The DOM (as in Document Object Model defined by W3C) has nothing to do with Javascript - it's just an API originally designed for accessing the various parts of HTML. It was set up so that it could be implemented for almost any language. In fact, had it actually used some of the more advanced (Self-inspired) features of Javascript within the definition of the DOM, the DOM may not have been such a pain in the ass. :)

What Javascript did manage to do that was very important is that it ended up becoming not only the most installed programming language of all time, but unlike BASIC, it's actually a pretty damn good language under the covers. So if anything, the fundamental innovation of Javascript within every browser has basically yielded another BASIC-like inspiration to a whole new generation of programmers. Except this time, their intro language was much more abstractly powerful.

Wikipedia says Ada:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming#Generics_in...

I've been working on something for a while that I think could represent a fundamental shift in constructing software. It's essentially an environment that takes collections of nodes and assembles them into self-defined constructs. Since there's nothing more than these simple key-value nodes, anything that is created is a matter of cloning an existing node, removing one, or setting the nodes state. There's no textual syntax besides operators in expressions. I haven't published the results yet, but if you're interested in finding out more, feel free to email me.

Alan Kay has been asking this question for a long time now. His "Viewpoints Research Institute" is doing some interesting work in this direction.

http://vpri.org/

One of their projects is to see if they can build a complete software stack -- from the OS through the GUI and networking/graphics libraries to end-user software -- all in 20,000 lines of code total.

They have already made some major progress in the past few years. I highly recommend reading (or skimming) their progress report from last year. In addition to being quite impressive, it also has several cool ideas that I had not seen directly before:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

"type inferencing as used in haskell et al, that's a fairly recent development - early 90's/late 80's?"

According to the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference#Hindley.E2.80.93...), it dates back to 1978