An awesome article about the future of programming languages: The Hundred-Year Language:
I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the next hundred years. They're nearly all going to be wasted. [...] The desire for speed is so deeply engrained in us, with our puny computers, that it will take a conscious effort to overcome it. In language design, we should be consciously seeking out situations where we can trade efficiency for even the smallest increase in convenience.