Let's ponder on one example where programming was fundamentally improved in the last 10 years. Git Some developers adopted immediately. Others were dragged into it kicking and screaming. Some ignored it (managers). In my humble opinion improvements on a given tool latch on the esoteric definition of what is considered "better". Better for me? Better for the company? Better for the machine? In the case of Git, the case is base on the "me" (Linus Torvalds). In the dev-world we had the joke that goes: If you don't like the tool/language go ahead and write your own. My take away is that improving programming languages and tools, can happen if we take the joke above at heart.