> Or was all the low-hanging fruit quickly picked in the early days of the computer age, and only hard problems remain on which little progress has been made?

> Or was all the low-hanging fruit quickly picked in the early days of the computer age, and only hard problems remain on which little progress has been made? Yes, most of the ground breaking theories were researched and documented decades ago. And some of that stuff has yet to make itself to mainstream programming languages (e.g. type inference). > Haven't any new ideas been introduced by the innovations of modern languages like Python, Lisp, Haskell and Ruby? Or even C++, Java and JavaScript? Apart from Lisp and Haskell, the "modern" languages you mention are rather boring when it comes to programming language design and there isn't too much research behind them. There has been a lot of practical work and research in garbage collection, run time systems, compiler back ends, just in time compilation and virtual machines. But when it comes to language design, the mainstream programming languages are really conservative.