After watching this talk I don't care what he comes up with in the future, I want to use it.

Excellent talk.

Are you familiar with JetBrains MPS?

http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

It sounds very much like what he is describing.

Yes, MPS and "language workbenches" in general are chasing something similar. Ideas like these are entirely in the details though, and so far I haven't found anything which does it for me. I could easily be missing it, in part because systems like MPS have a high up-front investment, and I have regretted such investments more often than not.

I don't think an IDE is the answer to the problem.

I think making Scala more correct and more modular is the answer. Hygienic macros and syntactic extensions are more what I had in mind. Rust seems to be a solid contender here but it's much more of a systems language.

That guy is a maniac. Much of the stuff that he was ranting off about are textbook examples of why functional programming and imperative programming ought to be separated from each other

The slide "What I'm after" may be found around the 38 minute mark.

It turns into a rant about how he'd wish the compiler and the editor and the source control should be all talking with one another.

It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk. The development environment is the same as the runtime environment, it has its own source control (Monticello), its own editor and a very regular language.

I can assure you of two things:

1) Paul is not ignorant of the existence of Smalltalk

2) Smalltalk is not a replacement for the fruits of modern language research. In fact, the academic work around Smalltalk is nothing more than unsupported opinion, and it's not even remotely useful as a source of research.

Parent was out of line but there is still plenty of modern academic research occurring around Smalltalk. Not to mention Gilad's Newspeak (which may or may not be academic, you'd have to ask him).

Can you think of a single example that:

1) Posits new conjectures 2) Proves those conjectures 3) Those conjectures can be used to formulate new conjectures that conform to items 1-3?

I've read a great deal of smalltalk literature, and I can't recall any papers that would qualify. There's plenty of empirical exploration of ambiguous hypothesis, but nothing that actually provides anyone in the field anything on which they could actually build.

Smalltalk lost the spot in the industry thanks to Java, sadly I doubt it will hardly get a second chance.

Back in the mid-90's, before Java was released to the world, I was using VisualWorks for an university project.

IBM was a big enterprise player with Visual Age for Smalltalk.

A small startup (Animorphic) was making Smalltalk faster (StrongTalk).

There were, of course, other companies searching their piece of the pie.

When Sun started pushing Java to the world, many in the Smalltalk world shifted direction.

Visual Age for Smalltalk architecture became the foundation of Eclipse.

Sun eventually bought Animorphic and Hotspot was born out of StrongTalk VM ashes.

Slowly, other Smalltalk players joined the party.

Smalltalk is dynamically typed so it's a non starter for most of the Scala and Haskell folks. Same for Lisp.

Well, there was StrongTalk as well.

"It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk."

I don't see how that's "funny" or relevant, as there are many other things about Scala that Smalltalk isn't just like.

It's hard to decide if his deep emotional investment is inspiring or frightening.

Why can't it be both??

I also vote for both.

If in doubt, order everything on the menu.