Following my blog post last year about the “four Rs of programming language design” I wrote a short essay expanding upon the idea which has now been included in the online post-proceedings of the ACM Onward ’11 essay track (part of the SPLASH conference).
The essay was a lot of fun to write (I somehow end up referencing books from the 19th century, a sci-fi novel, 1984, and The Matrix!) and is a kind of mission statement (at least for myself) for language design; it is available on my research page here. I hope that it provides some food-for-thought for others interested in, or working in, language design.
...never odd or even... 