[tannhaeuser]

No it isn't. There's a whole lot of programming beyond what a fictive HN crowd considers state of the art (even if it isn't in the proper sense, quite the opposite; but let's not go into that). It's just that those mature fields don't nearly get the airtime, since HN is a news site after all.

So there's a lot of programming going on in older stacks such as Fortran, COBOL, J2EE, etc.; the reason being that lots of apps were started when those stacks were current (eg. turn of the millennium saw a boom of e-commerce apps), and business is hesitant to change tech for change's sake. Isn't that what we're praying here all the time, like avoid big-time refactorings/rewrites?

As a corollary, the downside of this is that, as you mature, you see tech choices, unwillingly or not, as cyclical/generational, and dominated by a desire to find a niche in the industry and for job security rather than objective criteria more than we're willing to concede.