Heron

There's an interesting programming language developed by Christopher Diggins known as Heron. It is a language similar in spirit to C++ but with some modern software engineering techniques such as contracts built in. More interestingly, he is playing with concepts. Conceptual programming will, if done right, be the successor to Generic Programming (i.e., programming with templates). Conceptual programming allows structural conformance rather than name conformance. It is similar to duck typing (the definition on Wikipedia is essentially correct, though the history is screwed up). Another interesting language is Scala. I'm just beginning to look at it, but it looks to be a rather modern alternative to Common Lisp and CLOS. I'll keep you posted.