By: Abstract Type

I think the only thing that is new is the emphasis on parallel computing, especially asymptotic analysis for parallelism, and the emphasis on verification. What has happened is that these topics have suddenly become politically viable, whereas previously they were not, which allowed me to convince my colleagues that the time was right to emphasize FP. The fundamentals have not changed at all, just the perception of what is important by the unenlightened. In particular I believe that the whole mania about “object-oriented programming” in the 1990′s and 2000′s was a colossal backward step, because we already had better ideas long before these were introduced so broadly. And now we are seeing people step backwards and trying to pretend that what is old is new, and that what we’ve been saying for decades is suddenly now “object-oriented”, which is the preferred way to express approval of any idea whatsoever, particularly if it is not original.