Programming is very faddish. It's amazing how bad commonly used technologies are. I'm so happy I'm mostly a native developer and don't have to use the shitty web stack and its shitty replacements.
What really puzzles me is that Doug Cutting worked at Xerox PARC and Mike Cafarella has two (!) CS Masters degrees, a PhD degree, and is a professor at the University of Michigan. It's not like they were unaware of the previous work in the field (Connection Machine languages, Paralations, NESL).