[SkyMarshal]

PG covered the inertia problem pretty well with The Blub Paradox [1]. OO is now the blub language somewhere in the language power continuum, and those who don't know any other paradigm equally well are more likely to become and stay invested in it, hence the inertia.

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

[gruseom]

I've been as influenced by that essay as anybody here, but I'm not sure I believe in a power continuum anymore. How powerful a language is depends on who is using it. You can't abstract that away, but if you include it the feedback loops make your head explode.

The trouble I have with what you're saying is it suggests that a better paradigm (e.g. FP), higher-level and more powerful, will improve upon and succeed OO. But the greatest breakthroughs in my own programming practice have come from not thinking paradigmatically- to be precise, from seeing what I was assuming and then not assuming it.

Edit: My own experience has been this weird thing of moving back down the power continuum into an old-fashioned imperative style of programming, but still very much in Lisp-land. For me this has been a huge breakthrough. Yet my code isn't FP and it certainly isn't OO, so I guess it must be procedural. How much of this is dependent on the language flexibility that comes with Lisp? vs. just that Lisp happens to be what I like? Hard to say, but I suspect it's not irrelevant. If you can craft the language to fit your problem, you can throw out an awful lot. Like, it's shocking how much you can throw out.