In the future, mainstream programming languages will:

• allow base classes to be extended
• eliminate several new classes of errors from the language by design
• accessing arrays out-of-bounds
• dereferencing null pointers
• integer overflow
• accessing uninitialized variables
• introduce new concepts
• dependent types
• dependent functions
• universal quantification
• incorporate Haskell-style comprehensions
• perform lenient evaluation (as opposed to lazy evaluation)
• address concurrency through
• software transactional memory
• implicit data and thread parallelism

So says Tim Sweeney who gave a talk at POPL entitled “The Next Mainstream Programming Languages: A Game Developer’s Perspective“ via Lambda the Ultimate.