I think stevenspasbo did not mean to criticize the progress in this area, but rather just point out the misleading title of the article. Unless you program everything in pure ASM, Bios and up, you always stand on the shoulders of others, that's how since works. But the title of the article, "Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands," makes it sound as if there was a solution to these complex problems that could be expressed in 50 lines of code all along, and only now did we figure it out. The truth is, people have written thousands of lines of code, and put them into libraries, and now those tools can be used and leveraged to express complex solutions more easily.