an excellent talk about newsqueak, precursor to the go programming language. designer rob pike discusses fundamental concepts that newsqueak (and go) is based on. pike and co have picked up where dijkstra and hoare left off.

pike doesn't analyze this effect explicitly: but the ability to decouple a program's parts into concurrent communicating processes greatly simplifies the management of the program's state space... it's not just new ways to factor code. go has features that support both functional and concurrent construction.

these principles are very important; i expect the combination will trigger a major advance in program design.

i'd also love to see more of backus' work involved, when the time comes :)