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CS has this tendency to revive old ideas as we make progress with hardware. Raytracing for example is nowhere near a new idea, but with the progress made in graphics processors, real-time raytracing is suddenly the big new thing.

Also see functional programming :)

I think it's one of those ideas which is easy to state and easy to come up with by looking at the history but is very difficult to implement in practice. What does combining these ideas even mean?

Of course not. But executing it right is hard.