Reporting from TheServerSide Java Symposium last week, eWEEK reporter Daryl Taft sat in on a keynote presented by renowned book author, blogger and consultant Ted Neward. Neward heralded in a future comprised of a multitude of languages to help us solve a wider range of problems in the technical and business domains.  According to Neward, our current set of languages, including general purpose programming languages such as Java, are not adequately designed to address issues related to concurrency, appliation security and user interface expression, to name a few.

...the industry now is moving toward language-oriented programming and finding new uses for virtualization technology. Neward also encouraged the audience of primarily Java developers to look at other languages being supported on the Java Virtual Machine and even on top of the .Net platform.

ThoughtWorks architect Neal Ford echoed a similar theme in his keynote on on Language-oriented programming, which looked at how domain-specific languages (DSLs) can be used to to elevate our level of abstraction to better address specific problem domains and reduce complexity. 

TSS' Jack Vaughan provides In-depth coverage of the two keynotes:
DSLs, frameworks under consideration at TSS
Design your own language today: Ted Neward at TSSJS

Do you think Java is well-equipped to solve most, if not all, of our development needs or is there a need to stay abreast of new and emerging languages? Beyond Java, what other languages should people start investing their time learning?