A new programming language. Creating a new programming language is an act of bravery. I assume that one would like his language to be popular and to overcome the momentum behind existing languages (Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP/you-name-it) is very hard. Yet some people try. GOO is a Lisp-ish/Dylan-ish language in an early, but already usable, stage of life. The encouraging thing about GOO is that its author used to (I think) work on a commercial Dylan compiler, so he should know what he's doing. Arc is a very Lisp-ish, not-yet-released for public consumption, language. The encouraging thing about Arc is that its author is a very intelligent guy who wrote 2 great books about Lisp and has interesting ideas about programming language design.     

Those are the good times. I happen to agree with Robert that:

It's actually a great time to start a company selling Web tools. The barriers to entry are low. You can find lots of great employees and lots of office space. And you can get noticed with a pretty low marketing budget.

     

You'll have a job. This excellent post presents 12 reasons why a good programmer should not worry about employment. It comes from the "I couldn't say it better myself" department. I remember discussion with other programmers where they claimed that because VB and other such tools make programming easier, there will be less work and less demand for programmers. To which I say: bull. Those tools make some programming easier but at the same time a lot of programming becomes harder (because our software gets bigger), there are tons of new software that begs to be written and every year we tend to come up with a new, uncharted territory waiting to be filled with new software (web servers anyone?, IM systems, weblog software, native XML databases, web search engines - the list goes on and on). There'll be plenty of work for good people.