I think there are programming paradigms that haven't even been discovered yet. Rock music was "discovered" centuries after baroque music, and composers back then would have thought baroque music is the ultimate musical genre, which could not have been improved upon.

I've been working on a programming language recently that sort of programs itself. It's hard to explain how it works, since I approached it from a mathematical direction, but for a domain and range defined with a set of correct input-output pairs, there are an infinite number of functions which correctly maps one input to its corresponding output. If we define f_1 as all functions which correctly map the first IO pair, f_2 as functions which correctly map the second IO pair... Etc etc until we reach f_N, then the set intersection of all f_1...f_N is the set off all functions which satisfy our requirements. From this set of known correct functions, we can sort them by speed or some other trait.

But the devil's in the details there. I won't go into how I get f_1...f_N, but I'm having fun thinking about it & designing it. It may even be useful some day.