But while programming languages are academically interesting, I think we more desperately need innovation in programming environments.
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The programming environment isn’t a single component of our workflow, but the total sum enabled by the tools working together harmoniously. The environment contains the programming language, but also includes the debugging experience, dependency management, how we communicate with other developers (both within source code and without), how we trace and observe code in production, and everything else in the process of designing APIs to recovering from failure.
C brought practical portability to (what was at the time) high level programs. C literally elevated the programming environment out of processor-specific assembly code into a common vernacular. The legacy is so strong that most languages we use in production today are either direct descendants of C, or inherit much of their syntax, like curly brace-delineated blocks and structures, semicolon statement-terminators, and parenthesized function calls.
JavaScript is popular outside of the browser almost entirely on the merit of its ecosystem, its tooling, and the trivial debugging experience enabled by the repl. JavaScript’s programming environment is entirely interactive, visual, and real-time, without the need for clunky debugging apparatuses. The impact of that interactivity is obvious in the fact that many of my developer friends started programming on the Web, explicitly because it was the easiest way to write programs that produced output we could see and share.
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One of Go’s claims to fame and primary design goals is compilation speed. Compared to its predecessor C++, Go compiles fast. And when you make something fast, people start to use it differently.