I don't see that at all. I started out when "structured programming" and "recursion" were both exciting concepts. OO came along and over a ten year period went from "useful for UI" to "the One Ring To Rule Them All" and while the shine wore off a bit, it really did help.
Today Functional Programming is introducing all kinds of new ideas and approaches, and while I often find FP people over-earnest and irritating, I'm still able to recognize that they offer something new, even if it isn't all they think it is.
Impure functional languages like Haskell have shown that it's possible to get many of the advantages of a purely functional language while still being able to implement side-effects, which is an amazingly cool trick despite Haskeller's annoying insistance that their side-effect-ful "language" is "purely functional" even if they have to redefine "language" to make it true.
This is true of all the supposedly "pure" functional languages, which universally come with caveats that amount to "disregarding all the sex I've had, I am a virgin", but that's just a somewhat off-putting quirk of the community. The languages themselves are full of interesting ideas that are being adopted by less purity-obsessed languages, and this is a good thing in the same way that the OO-purism of SmallTalk drove other more mainstream languages to adopt OO ideas and bring them in adulterated form to the unwashed masses (which had the nice side-effect of driving the purists nuts, and who doesn't want to see that?)
So I personally get the feeling that it's a great time to be alive and active as a software developer. We're barely out of the "bash rocks together to make hammer-like-thing" era of programming, and we get to be part of the most explosive growth phase of the most important technological growth curve in human history: the algorithmization of work.
Today Functional Programming is introducing all kinds of new ideas and approaches, and while I often find FP people over-earnest and irritating, I'm still able to recognize that they offer something new, even if it isn't all they think it is.
Impure functional languages like Haskell have shown that it's possible to get many of the advantages of a purely functional language while still being able to implement side-effects, which is an amazingly cool trick despite Haskeller's annoying insistance that their side-effect-ful "language" is "purely functional" even if they have to redefine "language" to make it true.
This is true of all the supposedly "pure" functional languages, which universally come with caveats that amount to "disregarding all the sex I've had, I am a virgin", but that's just a somewhat off-putting quirk of the community. The languages themselves are full of interesting ideas that are being adopted by less purity-obsessed languages, and this is a good thing in the same way that the OO-purism of SmallTalk drove other more mainstream languages to adopt OO ideas and bring them in adulterated form to the unwashed masses (which had the nice side-effect of driving the purists nuts, and who doesn't want to see that?)
So I personally get the feeling that it's a great time to be alive and active as a software developer. We're barely out of the "bash rocks together to make hammer-like-thing" era of programming, and we get to be part of the most explosive growth phase of the most important technological growth curve in human history: the algorithmization of work.