I'm also generally a fan of multi-paradigm languages (such as OCaml, Scala, and F#), as pure languages often run into the problem (somewhat simplified) that the

I'm also generally a fan of multi-paradigm languages (such as OCaml, Scala, and F#), as pure languages often run into the problem (somewhat simplified) that they handle 80% of all problems well, 10% adequately, and 10% poorly. At the same time, I'm extremely skeptical of naming any single language the "programming language of the future". Application domains are simply too diverse for their problems to be solved adequately by any single language. On top of that, different people seem to think very differently: some have an easier time with a predominantly functional style, others get more mileage out of object-oriented programming (which again is completely alien to others) and so forth. If there's one thing that I'm fairly certain of is that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution in the realm of programming languages and environments.