Here's my question. What does "ground up" buy you? It is ideologically good, for sure. But it requires a viewpoint about future programming that is similar to e

Here's my question. What does "ground up" buy you? It is ideologically good, for sure. But it requires a viewpoint about future programming that is similar to existing programming: we'll write systems that are hard to maintain and are burdened with a lot of code doing relatively low-level data manipulations whose implementation can be automated. But if our future programming environments are "smaller and sleeker" in all respects(as is anticipated by, for example, the VPRI work on STEPS) this would be the wrong optimization to make. The cost of maintenance will go down across the board because the new languages let us express the change with less effort, and then complicated refactoring becomes less necessary again. (Counterpoint: We just build even more complex systems and then need better refactoring tools. An endless cycle...)