| I don't know. I've been writing software for over 24 years. I'm not that ancient but learning c as a youngster helps pad the numbers. There's an awful lot of cyclical patterns in development, and an awful lot of convergence. HTML5 canvas for example is an awful lot like writing custom 2d graphics back in the day. Docker, Vagrant, etc. are neat but there was chroot, zones, vmware images, cygwin etc. before. A lot of hot new language features as well are just existing patterns from the functional discipline being tacked onto imperative languages and vice versa. The fact that the constraints and reasons for adding generics to java or lambdas to c/c++ are different from the constraints and reasons for adding templating to c/c++ and lambdas to lisp doesnt mean that you can't go in if you understand one well and identify the pit falls or gotchas of newer implementations. Is it really meaningful to go all in on learning how feature x from 2000 repurposed to solve solution y is all that fundamentally different? WebSockets are great, so was long polling and comet architecture, restful is great, so was SOAP, and their non web based COM messaging or just cross application communication ancestors. There are a lot of pitfalls and unique characteristics to knew technologies but there is a lot more of new spins on old ideas, common underlying concepts and reinventing of the wheel. |
You had me until that (j/k)(mostly)
> Is it really meaningful to go all in on learning how ....is all that fundamentally different?
That'd be the diminishing returns I mentioned up-thread: each iteration of learning a new way to do an old problem gives you less. I'd argue it's still more than 0, but we aren't comparing to zero, we're comparing to the opportunity cost.
That said, I think, as a generalization, experienced devs tend to be prematurely dismissive. That is, however, a personal opinion.