While you weren’t looking, perl quietly deployed the best unicode support in any scripting language, added some kick-ass core features, and kept fixing security and performance issues. and they’re not the only ones. Racket, sbcl and chicken scheme are quietly deploying awesome tools in the lisp/scheme space long after they were left for dead by the language fetishists. Freebsd is delivering a great bsd-licensed OS while everyone talks about linux. While everyone was obsessing about mysql, postgres rolled out a great free and open RDBMS. All without noise, fanboys, or haters.