The universe of good - or even seemingly good - ideas may or may not be infinite, but it probably thins out as you get further away from the centre. It's unsurp

The universe of good - or even seemingly good - ideas may or may not be infinite, but it probably thins out as you get further away from the centre. It's unsurprising that the field would coalesce around certain demonstrably great ideas, and that revolutionary game-changers would start becoming harder and harder to find. FWIW, even in your list you see lots of variations on themes rather that unique ideas/models. Scheme and Lisp are closely linked. Pascal and Ada and Fortran are all conceptually similar, and there's a good amount of cross-pollination between them and Beta and Eiffel and C++. Self is an evolution of Smalltalk. And so on.