In a recent email discussion a fellow Microsoft Regional Director, Patrick Hynds, drew an analogy comparing programming languages to tanks and A-10 attack planes:

I know when to use a Tank (plodding and durable lethality) and I know when to use a A-10 (fast, maneuverable and vulnerable lethality), but if you make tanks fly and add a few feet of armor on an A-10 then you get the same muddy water we have between C# and VB.Net.  Those that know me will forgive the military analogy ;)

I continued the analogy:

The problem we have today, in my opinion, is that C# is a flying tank and VB is a heavily armored attack plane.

Microsoft did wonderful things when creating .NET and these two languages - simply wonderful. But the end result is that no sane person would purchase either a tank or an A-10 now, because both features can be had in a single product. Well, actually two products that are virtually identical except for their heritage.

Of course both hold baggage from history. For instance, C# clings to the obsolete concept of case-sensitivity, and VB clings to the equally obsolete idea of line continuation characters.

Unfortunately the idea of creating a whole new language where the focus is on the compiler doing more work and the programmer doing less just isn't in the cards. It doesn't seem like there's any meaningful language innovation going on, nor has there been for many, many years...

(Even LINQ (cool though it is) doesn't count. We had most of LINQ on the VAX in FORTRAN and VAX Basic 15 years ago...)

The only possible area of interest here are DSLs (domain-specific languages), and I personally think they are doomed to be a repeat of CASE.