The fundamental turn of software toward concurrency, decentralization, distribution, interaction calls for conceptually extending or evolving mainstream programming paradigms with proper high-level features to tackle these aspects. To this purpose, in this paper we discuss the value of agent-oriented programming as a general-purpose programming paradigm to tackle this challenge, and, in particular, we present an agent-oriented programming language called simpAL, which is based on agent-oriented abstractions that are meant to simplify the programming of modern applications.