This "Magellanic view" of programming language exploration doesn't seem quite right. Programming language design is mostly not about finding virgin territory by

This "Magellanic view" of programming language exploration doesn't seem quite right. Programming language design is mostly not about finding virgin territory by inventing brand new ideas (which was admittedly easier in the era when high-level languages were brand new – i.e. in the 1950s). Rather, it's mostly about finding unexplored folds hidden nearby in the vast, combinatorial manifold of ways to combine existing ideas in a single, coherent language. In my experience, people who have spent a lot of time designing languages are the most sympathetic to people trying new permutations – precisely because they are so painfully aware of all the awful compromises they were forced to make in their own designs and their understanding that much better ways of combining those features might be so tantalizingly close. Scala is a great example: the innovation of the language is not so much in new language features, but rather in its ingenious combination of so many powerful features into a single, coherent system. Of course, some may argue that Scala has too many features (I'm a bit terrified of it), but it's indisputable that putting all those pieces together in a way that works is tour de force of language design.