Alex is one of the most thoughtful students of programming languages I know. I know he's spent time learning countless languages, he literally wrote the book on Scala, and for three years now he's organized the Emerging Languages conference (http://emerginglangs.com/). The conference features talks about interesting programming languages, no matter how obscure, predominantly from the creators and designers of those languages. So far as I know, it is the only conference of its kind, and is a huge service to the programming language ecosystem.
(As an aside, said ecosystem is going through something of a renaissance. The quickly growing need for server-side software (where choice of tools need not impact the end user), the increased availability of low-level infrastructure such as the JVM and LLVM, and the ever-more-important challenges of concurrent and distributed programming have all contributed to this renewed interest in new programming languages.)
If Alex is going to spend his time working on things related to programming languages and developer tools, then I, for one, can't wait.
Sorry, but Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon and Bill Venners wrote the book on Scala: Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition[1]
(As an aside, said ecosystem is going through something of a renaissance. The quickly growing need for server-side software (where choice of tools need not impact the end user), the increased availability of low-level infrastructure such as the JVM and LLVM, and the ever-more-important challenges of concurrent and distributed programming have all contributed to this renewed interest in new programming languages.)
If Alex is going to spend his time working on things related to programming languages and developer tools, then I, for one, can't wait.