Early stage computer science research is not an area I'm familiar with, but I would be curious to know where the current research is headed in terms of radicall

Early stage computer science research is not an area I'm familiar with, but I would be curious to know where the current research is headed in terms of radically rethinking the way we think about and represent code. That said as an admittedly very naive observer, it would seem to me that it's very difficult to get away from the basic building blocks we've come to know, not only from a social standpoint (i.e. several generations of programmers think in these terms now). But also because the hardware hasn't changed fundamentally. While capacity and compute speed have gone up, today's computers still work the same way at their core as their predecessors. The math they use is the same, the basic components are the same (until memristors hit the scene I guess). The operations microprocessors can carry out and the way they need to access data forces you to implement the core of a programming language a certain way. Once that happens, then all the abstractions on top of that start to inherit many of those semantics. When you get right down to it, processors shove binary data around and permute it based on a set of well-defined mathematical principles. Until they start doing things differently, I feel like we're "stuck" with those "if" statements (or their logical equivalents) and all their cousins for a while.