In order to see genuinely new developments, you need to be in an environment where something genuinely new is happening. Most modern languages are some combination of decades old, or semantically essentially identical to languages decades old. If it seems like we&#x27;re mostly shuffling the same basic ideas around and recombining them in those environments, well, yes, we absolutely are.<p>This is not as bad as it seems. There is something to be said with engineering with time-tested and well-established components. Even imperfect components with well-understood imperfections may be preferable to things that aren&#x27;t well-understood, but some guy somewhere says may be theoretically perfect. But the flip side of the landscape being well-explored is that there is little new stuff to discover.<p>Two major places where you can see legitimately new stuff come to mind. First, Haskell. By being seriously, no foolin&#x27; concerned about purity and immutability, there&#x27;s been a lot of work done in Haskell that in any other language, even those that sort of came close, was done by simply doing something impure and calling it a day.<p>Second, Rust. At the moment my perception of the community is that it is very young, the language is still changing significantly, and the concern right now is more about making new things work at all in the new paradigm than about the best way to do them. There&#x27;s a big influx right now of the very new programmers who will later be doing new experiments, but they&#x27;re still learning. Such exploration is absolutely necessary. But in the next year or two I bet we start to see a transition to more genuinely new things as the capabilities start to sink in, and the feedback loop between the real programs people are writing and what features the language grows develops.<p>(Personally, if you&#x27;re really <i>interested</i> in new things, I&#x27;d stay here rather than go to the really academic languages. It is my perception that the academic languages often have serious problems because they&#x27;ve cut themselves off from the practical world and severed themselves from an incredibly valuable feedback loop, the one that Haskell has used to propel itself to what success it has by actually letting real programmers into the sandbox to try to do real work. Academia is, in its own way, stuck in a rut right now at the limit, IMHO, where it all sort of looks very same-y to me.)