I have been programming for about 30 years (including school years). Professionally for 18 years.

Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones? Then about 20 frameworks in each of them. And add another 200 popular libraries for each language? This matrix make no sense till you realize - it is preferences all the way down.

Most of us engineers have built our own mental model of programming. We are all right. But the users do not care. LLMs are here to produce code closer and closer to the metal as needed. They can sit and create a graph out of every spec, use an AST that they develop and run on the CPU if they have to. They will do it. No amount of us discussing will stop that.

Programming is going to be re-invented. I do not think the current ways to write software will even matter.

Your comment started strong. "30 years programming experience", asking interesting questions, I really hoped you'd say something profound... then it went down to whatever this is. The reason there are many programming languages and frameworks isn't programmer's preferences but rather their utility in solving specific problems. Take Prolog for example. Can you technically do what it does in JS? Yes. Can you do frontend in Prolog? Probably yes, but you wouldn’t [ab]use one tool when the other is due. Your argument reads as someone who claims to be a professional but opens the toolbox and says: "do you know why there are so many tools?" And then goes to answer: "because I like it so"! What the ... ?

> it is preferences all the way down

No you're falling victim to the common programmer fallacy that "my use case is everyone's use case"

These things exist because people had different use cases and priorities over the years