People have also been trying to make programs composable for a long time. By 1990, they succeeded: Smalltalk, Oberon and Plan 9 all worked, though in very diff

People have also been trying to make programs composable for a long time. By 1990, they succeeded: Smalltalk, Oberon and Plan 9 all worked, though in very different ways. Plan 9 even dispensed with the head application, because you save typing a character when you implement it in AWK as NR<. And no one used these systems. At this point it's clear that the average programmer, let alone the average user, actually likes getting paid to write mindless glue code and copy data from one spreadsheet cell to another. I've been teaching physics and maths for years, long enough to learn that normal people have a strong aversion to the sort of abstract thinking that these systems demand of them.