I agree that there doesn't seem to be much advancement over the 80s (I'm trying to learn emacs for Clojure right now). I don't agree that commercial success is

I agree that there doesn't seem to be much advancement over the 80s (I'm trying to learn emacs for Clojure right now). I don't agree that commercial success is not an indicator of real progress. For example, LISPs did not run well on 80s computers. The Japanese, amongst others, had to create special computers to control their trains. Rules based programming performed poorly too. May other such paradigms and tools fall into this category. For the most part the old, neat tools of now have the hardware necessary for them to be useful. The JVM provides great performance for Clojure. Over the last 30 years, multi-threaded concepts coalesced too. Now they're built into mainstream languages. Provided people stop trying to solve already solved problems like task management, we could possibly be on the verge of productivity improvements.