Modern Programming Language Concepts (was: RE: Supercompiled Perl)

On 10 Aug 2001, at 10:49, Lee Goddard wrote:

> What new concepts have been made manifest in languages that I can
> use today? I'll try them out. 

Seems you are asking 2 questions:

1. What new concepts have been made manifest in languages?

-> There are a lot of text books, articles and research papers on 
this subject. I probably shouldn't start to cite them here.

2. Which of these languages can I use today?

-> Depends on the kind of your projects, on your skills, and 
possibly some more parameters.

In my current project, for example, I am using Erlang 
<http://www.erlang.org> and Refal <http://www.refal.net>. (I wasn't 
always so lucky, I had to use COBOL, C++, VB, Java, and Perl in 
past projects.) There are quite a few languages you might want to 
consider, if you want to gain the advantages of modern 
programming language concepts and if you can afford to go without 
the advantages of a language which is in widespread use. (This is 
one of the reasons why these languages aren't used by a lot of 
programmers: Most can't afford to use a language which is not in 
widespread use.)

If you really want to know more about this subject, this list 
probably isn't the best place to ask questions about it. This is a 
Perl list and here we shouldn't discuss which language we could 
use instead of Perl, but how we can improve programming with Perl 
(e.g. by using the concepts of supercompilation :-).

-- Helmut