apparently microsoft has been looking at developing a new language that is data-centric, codenamed X#.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/1,4248,766199,00.asp
the idea of developing new languages that are non-object-oriented is a great idea, and i personally don't believe that objects as a first-class concept are really that great. i'm much more into the concept of operations as first-class entities, much like proteins/enzymes are first-class entities in biology. proteins perform actions on other entities, are codified and replicated very efficiently, and work in massive parallel. for example, instead of reverse() being a method on a String class, reverse() would be a free-floating entity that operates on Strings to create reversed Strings. a String itself would be also be a free-floating entity that has no intrinsic operations.
there are a lot of cool ramifications of this approach; one day i hope to dedicate some time to building a proof-of-concept of this approach, but right now service-oriented architectures consume all my time.
i built a small super-computer about ten years ago out of INMOS transputer chips, as well as a language that prototyped some of these ideas. unfortunately, the hardware was about 100 orders of magnitude too slow to make the language practical. nowdays it's a different story. it would also be great to build hardware to support a new kind of biologically-inspired language, since the current hardware is stack-based and incredibly retarded for true parallelism.
as my company's web page mentions, i believe that a lot of the concepts that emerge in service-oriented architectures will be more inspired by biology than by traditional CS concepts. GAIA is already feeling more organic than anything i've worked on before.
12:06:50 AM 
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