I think things like dependency injection popularity can be explained by looking at communities created around programming languages. Particularly, the levels of

I think things like dependency injection popularity can be explained by looking at communities created around programming languages. Particularly, the levels of abstraction a given community encourages is largely constant. Java is probably the leader in the amounts and levels of abstraction it's community uses. J2EE's EJB are a thing of the past, nowadays it's IC. And PHP for a long time is battling it's inferiority complex by imitating "serious" Java. I'm not saying that using a lot and deep abstractions is necessarily bad. You can write programs with the same functionality using different levels of it. What I'm saying that discussions like that are more "cultural wars" and there's no rational proof what's better.