That particular quote is from the "Epigrams on Programming" article by Alan J. Perlis, from 1982. Lots of ideas/"Epigrams" from that list are useful, and many languages have implemented lots of them. But some of them aren't so obvious until you've actually put it into practice. Full list can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117034445/http://www-pu.inf... (the quote in question is item #9)

I think most people haven't experienced the whole "100 functions on 1 data structures instead of 10 on 10" thing themselves, so there is no attempts to bring this to other languages, as you're not aware of it to begin with.

Then the whole static typing hype (that is the current cycle) makes it kind of difficult because static typing kind of tries to force you into the opposite of "1 function you can only use for whatever type you specify in the parameters", although of course traits/interfaces/whatever-your-language-calls-it helps with this somewhat, even if it's still pretty static.