[DanWeinreb]

Yes. That's why you want a multi-paradigm language, in which all of those methods of writing code are available. The trick is to figure out how to provide all of them in a way that is well-integrated. I feel that Common Lisp does this very well. For example, when you want a method to get called, you don't use a special "send message" operator; you use a generic function. It looks just like a function call, to the caller; the fact that this call is doing a method dispatch is part of its internal implementation, rather than part of its externally-visible contract.

One reason Lisp has survived so long because it is capable of absorbing so many of the good new programming ideas as they come along. (No, it's not perfect this way, but it's pretty darned good.)

[stcredzero]

What about some sort of clean meta-language framework? Lisp can claim to be one of these -- it's the only language that is it's own Abstract Syntax Tree. Smalltalk goes a certain distance in that direction.

I think there is a great need for a multi-language framework, because different languages have such disparate power depending on what you are working on. I keep on thinking back to Rob Pike's Google Tech Talk on Newsqueak. He spends 6 months developing a language that does concurrency at a high level. After that, he writes a windowing GUI system in two hours.

What we need is the ability to support disparate language semantics and glue them together easily. It would be great to be able to model your business logic in Smalltalk, but write the GUI in something like Newsqueak.

Maybe Richard Stallman's original idea with GUILE was on the right track?