> Tech is driven by fashion more than anything else
So I agree the field has remained disorganized, with it's research and development severely underfunded. There is no language implementation wiki. The field's research is often by years of intermittent incremental papers, and little bus-factor one projects. We're down to like one biggish industrial research lab. And ARPA, sigh. And professional progress, often seems sort of exploration by an army of wandering ants, rather than purposeful pursuit of economic development and human progress.
So with the poorly organized professional knowledge, and the unacceptability of high onboarding costs, yes, there's a lot of random motion. And the scrambling mob carves a flood plain.
But.
Cohort learning is actually a good learning strategy. And given how big the field has gotten, and the criticality of community, it's a plausible local heuristic to "follow the mob - it's path will likely at least be plausible, even though not optimum, and the inevitable obstacles can be collaborative tunneled through, or filled in with bodies". And the profession is not just larger, but vastly better trained than it used to be. There's a massive education process in progress.
And the "driven by fashion" argument gets used a lot. At least sometimes, it's clearly an "argument from failure of imagination". A "I can't imagine what they're thinking, they must all be nuts". Sometimes your expertise in some domain corner is enough to confidently say that. Or the nuttiness is nicely compact - "Google backs it, so I'm sure it will be supported for decades". But it seems most use of the argument is more... ambitious than that.
> Tcl is a powerful language that you can use to create complex systems with simple code, the holy grail.
Tcl/Forth/Smalltalk/Lisp/Self/APL/Oz/... we've had many many languages with glints of grail. We're just still really bad at combining and polishing them.
There's little funding for it. So it's a multi-decade incremental creep. An "if you're still alive to see it" bright side might be, it looks like the transition to "no longer crippling", when it finally happens, might be a "boom - new world" kind of thing.
EDIT: aside: I saw the other day that React native(?) could now be packaged up with it's own little embedded faux file system... and thought, yay, we're catching up with 1990's Tcl! (The Tcl app distribution story was excellent). You just need to have a half century of patience, and it will all work out. Patents only last two decades. And we're only failing, what, 7 billion people? Delay a year, miss a 130 million person cohort. No problem.