Isn't abstraction merely an "indoctrinated" kind of convenience? Surely you can, with a huge amount of inconvenience, achieve in Pascal what you routinely do i

Isn't abstraction merely an "indoctrinated" kind of convenience? Surely you can, with a huge amount of inconvenience, achieve in Pascal what you routinely do in C++, by passing "self" into function calls and manually implementing vtable lookups? :) (You might have a point with C++ templates but that's just saving yourself the trouble of a bunch of copy and pasta....) Similarly, the "2GL" to "3GL" transition merely gives you the convenience of not having to maintain a call stack. There's no magic, you just save yourself trouble of writing boilerplate code with pushing and popping pointers and stack variables. I would argue that the only reason it's considered a "paradigm shift" is merely because you were "indoctrinated" into thinking those advancements were so great that they were "more than" mere convenience. But, at least in retrospect, they are _trivial_ when compared with the advancements made in recent years (eg. Garbage Collection, Rust's safe memory management, import tensorflow, etc.). And while the old school programming language advancements surely boost programmer productivity and accuracy, I don't think it's fair to say they're more important than say the convenience of an "import fancypackage" that does 90% of the work for you. Perhaps the form of improvement is often not in a new programming language (because perhaps classical languages are "good enough" for most cases), but I know I wouldn't enjoy programming with the tools available 20 years ago. PS: I suspect your C++ perspective might also have tinted your perspective a bit. For the examples I gave as more recent advancements (i.e. GC, Rust, TF), they aren't (readily) available in C++. Sure you can say you prefer the speed of C++ which is entirely fair, but you might be pleasantly surprised if you looked outside.