It's an exciting time to be working in programming languages: industry is finally taking formal work in verification seriously, mainstream languages have nice type-theoretic features (e.g. Scala) and older languages retrofit them, finally a realistic C/C++ successor is on the horizon (Rust), mature tools like LLVM make it easy to build optimising compilers with relative ease, and fancy tools like meta-tracing make interpreters fast, so inventing new languages stops being a pain.