Comment by dampier

This fills me with hope.

Functionally striking, visually beautiful -- it makes me feel suddenly like things are coming together in a way that might stick this time around.

In form: Value placed on aesthetics -- beautiful & functional design -- is a concept that's taken root in the marketplace at large.

In code: Like gfodor commented, it feels like the doors are open wider than they've been in a long time to new ideas, and that we see some elegant language mechanisms being rediscovered and rising to the top.

In tools: The same pattern ... with lots of points of reference, a critical mass of seekers and open source contributors, and bootstrapped on powerful tools that allow rapid expression of new ideas, the good ones see the light of day and, if successful, can take an advantage of an unprecedented kinetics of this ecology to rise to viability and then prominence.

I hope you'll forgive me if I'm blowing this out of proportion to wax elegiac or whatever -- it just suddenly feels like a good day to be a programmer.