Where are programming languages going?

Anders Hejlsberg gave a keynote last month at JAOO http://jaoo.blip.tv/#1324214 (published two weeks ago) entitled "Where are programming languages going?". He said that with a little more restriction in languages, compilers could do a much better job at optimizing the code. I think this is an interesting discussion and agree with many of he ideas.

Towards the end of the talk he addressed concurrency. He suggested that a for loop, for example, could automatically execute all iterations in parallel - if few mutable variables existed. This is an interesting idea, although a very difficult task. Unless the code fits into the map-reduce pattern, it will likely modify some shared memory structure or external state (read database) and could not safely be executed in parallel. I think we will have to see more integration between persistence frameworks and optimizers before such as idea could be realized.