| Sean McDirmid's work on Glitch is an interesting (and distinctly contra- the current "FP all the things!" zeitgeist) approach to live programming: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/ Conal Elliott's work on Tangible FP was an interesting attempt to unify functional and "visual" programming that has been mostly abandoned: http://conal.net/papers/Eros/
Hopefully some of its ideas may yet survive in other projects. The Berkeley Orders of Magnitude project is somewhere at the intersection of database and PL research, aimed at handling orders of magnitude more data with orders of magnitude less code: http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/
The Dedalus language in particular is interesting, as it integrates distributed- and logic-programming: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-17... Joe Armstrong's thoughts on a module- or namespace-less programming environment are interesting: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768... I've been meaning to write a blog post about the convergence of various ideas of what the future of programming might look like for a while now, so I have a bunch of notes on this topic. The OP & other folks have already mentioned most of the other projects in my notes - in particular Unison, Subtext, Eve, & Bret Victor's work. My current line of work is on tackling a tiny little corner of what I see as the future's problems - trying to find a better way to combine database/relational programming and functional programming. My work is here (but the docs are almost entirely in type-theory-jargon at the moment, sorry! feel free to shoot me an email if you have questions): https://github.com/rntz/datafun |