It is part of the marketing for several "new hotness" languages (however long ago their development started). Back when Java was new, the same marketing talk was directed at OOP, which isn't cool any more.
Especially when we consider how Java crowd have misunderstood OOP and emphasized stupid class hierarchies and static typing (and design patterns as a result) instead of message-passing and message-based polymorphism and protocols as the essence of the original paradigm developed by Smalltalk authors.
