Part of the joy of being a hobby programmer is that I can afford to get sidetracked by all the cool things that "real world" hackers have to put on the back burner because there is paying work. (Not that I wouldn't take a paying gig mind you) One of those side tracks is language design, specifically as it relates to parallel computation. That why I was so interested in the video of Rich Hickey's talk from the JVM Language Summit:

Are We There Yet?. Rick Hickey. JVM Language Summit, Nov 12, 2009.

I've kicked around thoughts about how to make a naturally parallel OO programming language for a while now. This talk solidified some of my thoughts on the matter. For example, Objects in a parallel world need to be the sole authority on their state, anything that is not an Object must be immutable, and programs must accept that their data is always (at least potentially) stale.

I think Ruby is a great language, but I can envision a language that maps its friendly syntax onto a more powerful processing model. There are times when I think it would be fun to try to construct such a language, but I have neither the skill nor the resources to make it happen. In any case, give the video a good viewing, even for users of older languages, it will give a lot of insight.