See also the Gary Bernhardt talk, Capability vs. Suitability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 Some tec

See also the Gary Bernhardt talk, Capability vs. Suitability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 Some technologies are radical new developments designed to give people some new capability they never had before. Other technologies are refinements of some previous capability technology, restricting the capabilities but more suitable for some particular problem-space or setting. It's not necessarily "nobody has big ideas anymore", it's just a natural cycle. On the other hand, if you want a less-charitable view, consider this: programming in the 1980s was dominated by ideas from C, a language developed in the 1970s. Programming in the 1990s brought the influence of Smalltalk, a language developed in the 1970s. The 2000s saw the introduction of functional programming ideas from Lisp, a language developed in the 1970s. These days, the hot new programming language features are being taken from Standard ML, a language developed in the 1970s. Someday the 1970s will be mined out, and then we can start coming up with new ideas again.