[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.