[thom]

Paradigms aren’t just technical capabilities within a language, they’re also modelling approaches for real world problems.

Imperative programming lets you think about a series of steps. Structured programming lets you split and name series of steps into known procedures and structures. Object oriented programming (and object relational mapping) was wildly successful because a lot of enterprise programming is about interactions between durable real world entities. Functional programming remains somewhat niche because modelling in terms of pipelines of pure functions is hard to map to real world problems without great discipline.

None of these is right or wrong, nor is any subset or combination. But they’re not just regrettable constraints, they’re valuable ways of thinking. Any language seeking to grow beyond one or more paradigms still needs to offer a clear and consistent way for programmers to reason about the world.