Charles Miller says:

Shortly, some technology is going to appear and blow my socks off. But it's more likely to appear in some experimental corner of JBoss 4.0 than it is in J2EE 1.4 or in .NET. And it's quite likely going to appear in Python or Ruby, or even coded in C by some college student or lab assistant who has thought of a really neat way to solve a real problem in the real world, and wants to share that solution with the rest of us. And we'll take it, and use it in ways the inventor never dreamed of. That's where revolutions come from.

The possibility of this happening to me is what keeps me going. I have to face it, programming has been fun for me only in fits and starts over the last few years. 9 years ago, when I was working at my first job out of college, I'd go to work, code for 8 or 9 hours, and then go home and code some more. These days, I have more important things to do, and less desire to reinvent wheels or to spend time solving problems that have nothing to do with the problem I set out to solve.

Charles points to Bruce Eckel (no permalinks) comments on 3-26-03, where he recounts some notes from the keynote at the recent Python Conference, which Bruce attributed to Paul Prescod. I've seen those comments attributed elsewhere to Paul Graham, and the conference schedule agrees with that. Aside from that, Bruce captures some additional comments that I hadn't seen before, particularly this one:

We could design a language now that could appeal to people in a hundred years, assuming unlimited resources. We could design the core language today. Optimistically there might only be a few languages in a hundred years. If the 100-year language were available today, would we want to use them? He says yes. Why not try writing this language now and see what it's like to program in?