To me it looks like the increasing popularity of AOP and richer (or at least more functional) syntax in languages like Ruby, the relative ubiquity of property chaining and two-way data binding across different frameworks, is moving towards a more semantic type of software specification where structures and relationships are more important.

I think that's pretty obviously a good thing since it reduces the cyclomatic complexity, coupling, amount of code, and increases reuse, although you can obviously take it a little far when you are actually using a mostly imperative paradigm.

I think this is one of the types of things that is going to (eventually someday) finally wake people up to the limitations of unstructured (although colorful) ASCII source editing.