Programming enthusiast Joe is browsing Hacker News on a Saturday afternoon, and sees a story about Clojure, a Lisp-like programming language which he keeps hearing about. The comments on the story are filled with positive experiences reported by his peers, so he decides to spend a few hours checking it out.

Within thirty minutes, he's installed the Clojure language runtime and tools; and downloaded the Peepcode screencast and Pragmatic Studio eBook. With a video describing the language's core principles running in a background window, Joe tinkers with the basic syntax in the REPL. By the end of the afternoon, Joe has written some simple programs and has a familiarity with both the basic usage of the language, and some of its underlying principles.

From here, it's a small step for Joe to use Clojure for his next hobby project. And that might lead to using it for a small tool or app at his programming day job, or at his next startup.

This is the future for top programmers. For the mid to lower levels I think the single language/platform paradigm will likely remain.