In your opinion, what lasting legacy has Modula-3 brought to computer development?

I think what's important is that Modula-3 played a major role in popularizing the notion of type-safe programming. Cedar/Mesa was tremendously innovative, but was always kept "secret" at Xerox (I doubt that even now you can get its manual). And ML (the other root language of type safety) was always an academic non-object-oriented language. Modula-3 was the stepping stone from Cedar/Mesa to Java; and today, type-safe programming is a given. I am personally very proud (as a former ML type-safe programmer) that I was able to hang-on to Modula-3 until Java came out, therefore avoiding the C++ era altogether!

What are you proudest of in terms of the language's development and use?

The development of the type system, and the module system. In terms of use, we used it for over 10 years (including Modula-2+) to write all our software, from OS's to GUI's, for several million lines of code. One of the most amazing features of Modula-3 was the Network Objects, (but that was not my work), which was transferred directly to become Java RMI.

Where do you see computer programming languages heading in the future, particularly in the next 5 to 20 years?

Functional programming is coming back. Even an object-oriented language like C# now is a full functional language, in the sense that it supports first-class nameless lambda abstractions with proper scope capture and type inference, and developers love it. Other proper functional languages (which do not include object-oriented features) like F# and Haskell are becoming more and more popular.

Do you have any advice for up-and-coming programmers?

Read other people's code!

Is there anything else of interest that you'd like to add?

Only that the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.