[ncmncm]

Any claimed "essence of programming" has as much validity as an "essence of art". It is each generation's responsibility to overturn their spiritual parents' essence and invent a new one.

Of course nothing is lost, and we are all richer for the adoption of new ways of seeing and thinking.

The experience of the '90s and the then insistence on primacy of "paradigms" should stand as a red warning to us all. Programming is nothing if not a creative endeavor, with as much scope for original thought and insight as any other. If you are not learning new "essences" on a regular basis, you are wasting your life.

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Anytime you are learning new X on a regular basis, X is (by definition: these have been technical terms for ~2.5 millennia already) "accident", not "essence".