Ted Neward has some notes on Microsoft’s recent Lang.NET symposium. In his notes on Day One he  mentions a remark by Anders Hejlsberg that “languages are becoming amalgam”. I don’t have any more details on what was said but it chimes with what I’ve observed in the last few years. We’ve seen C# and .NET take on characteristics of functional and dynamic languages; we’ve seen C# and Java adopt similar features; we’ve seen JavaScript/ActionScript evolve into another similar language.

Neward adds:

if languages are slowly “bleeding” out of their traditional taxonomies, how will the vast myriad hordes of developers categorize themselves?

Personally I’ve long thought that good developers can adapt relatively easily to different languages. Maybe it is more interesting now to look at development methodologies, whether implicit or explicit.

Further, even if business/web development languages are converging, native code memory-juggling in C or C++ remains distinctive and necessary.