On java.sun.com, there is a very interesting interview with Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect at Sun (and also a former chess master and the daughter of a famous mathematician). There are some minor issues I have with her wording - there seems to be some confusion between functional and procedural languages, and I also believe that thing you use in XML all over is called pointy brackets, not square ones. But her thoughts on the inadequate abstractions we have in today’s programming languages are very interesting, indeed. Maybe there is a spectrum — a language with pure mathematical elegance, like Lisp, for usage by the A-level geeks, and some sort of building block-based, high level programming language for the masses; quite possibly with one built upon the other. [via connections]