One part that piqued my interest was Carmack's interest in using functional languages. Of course he goes on to say that it would be hard with people making the switch and all that after.
“It's not because people are no good. The very best programmers always make mistakes. This is something that I've really internalized; that, no matter how good you think you are, you are making mistakes all the time, and you have to have structures around you to try and help you limit the damage that your mistakes will cause, find them as early as possible, so that you can correct them, and the earliest possible time is at compile time. So I'm all about trying to be much more restrictive on what we can do, here. And on the one hand, I would entertain programming in—I'm very tempted to want to move to—a functional programming language; start programming in Haskell or OCaml or something, but that's not a credible thing to do in the game industry.”