Comment by hythloday
13 years ago
Things like the CAP theorem, monads, functional programming and distributed systems knowledge, programmable graphics pipelines, and the pervasiveness of unit testing and CI infrastructure certainly look like advances in mainstream programming technology to me. Are you sure you're not defining "mainstream programming technology" to mean "what I know", and arguing that you don't feel like you know much more than when you started programming?
Functional programming is neither mainstream nor is it new. It dates to Lisp in the 1960's and was refined by SML in the 1970. What's new in the mainstrea of distributed systems? Programmable rendering pipelines date to renderman in 1988 if not earlier. I don't know what to tell you if you think unit testing and continuous integration are new.