And so the history of programming has been a series of advancements in both removing barriers to composability, and building new programming technologies that b

And so the history of programming has been a series of advancements in both removing barriers to composability, and building new programming technologies that better facilitate composition. This is like saying that the history of architecture has been a series of advancements in reducing the cost of structures. This is the fallacy of narrow focus a single sexy metric. (See below.) Stage 4: Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer Smalltalk tried to do this with the Image, which contained everything within it, including compiler, source control, and development environment. (Smalltalk started out as an Operating System.) However, what this actually did was to sequester the community in the boundaries of the image while the rest of the programming field was busy building varied forms of infrastructure to allow interaction. I think this hypothesis also offers an explanation for why Go is popular, even though the language is “boring” and could have been designed in the 1970s. Java won over Smalltalk because the Java community understood much better how to win mindshare. Ruby took over Smalltalk's pure object schtick because it could play nice with the rest of the programming world, and it had a killer app in Rails. Go wins because it is exceedingly well designed for convenience in a myriad of ways where other languages drop the ball. You can have very fast incremental compilation in C++, if you are careful. In Go, it just works. You can have a good deployment process with Java, if you are careful. In Go, it just works. You can have easy to use concurrency in other languages, like C#, provided you find and learn the correct libraries. In Go, it's baked into the language, and people can learn how to use it competently with about as much effort as learning how to implement FSM using switch{}, and very good documentation and tutorials are dead easy to find. A Lamborghini is way faster than a Corolla. A Ford F300 can haul many times more groceries. A Corolla doesn't have remotely near the potential for track day fun as an Ariel Atom. The above 3 qualities are sexy metrics, but in terms of overall utility and convenience for the largest number of people, for the most favorable cost/benefit, the boring old Corolla kicks butt. (That said, I'm pretty sure that someone can figure out how to disrupt programming in the way that companies like Tesla are poised to disrupt the above story. It might well be a "boring" version of functional programming that has many "just works" qualities.)