Oh. Sorry, the website is currently not in a very good state. Feel free to ask any questions here.
Note: very pleased that the box serving the site is pretty consistently at less than 1% CPU during the HN hug of death.
Are the mechanisms for defining architectural styles and some predefined styles (OO call/return, pipes & filters, REST and event broadcast) all that is new from Objective-S? Any other future goals? These seem relatively easy to implement as e.g. Lisp macros? Clojure supports many of these.
Personally, I would like to see more research in program semantics. I think languages should try to reduce expressiveness whenever possible by offering mechanisms to do so, i.e. DSLs and DSL tools. Along with the total lack of popularity of design-by-contract / Hoare logic / refinement types, I think this is the biggest mistake in modern language design.
In other fields, engineers strive to use components and to combine them in ways that yield artifacts with provable properties. An elementary example of this are truss structures in mechanical engineering.
There is not that much research direction in this area. Personally, I like Dafny [2]. There is quite a lot of research on advanced type systems and theorem proving, but I think there is still a big gap in usability and automation. I think DSLs to restrict semantics + automated program analyses could be an excellent alternative. Infer [3] is pretty nice. Similar approaches that targeted a language with better semantics would be able to offer a lot more guarantees.