The sad part is that when you reach that age (31 here) is you start looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecesary and the "new devs" that doesn't have any experience on making and maintaining long term projects (> 5 years) look at this as the holy grail technology and if you aren't using that technlogy it means you aren't as efficent as the "new guys" so you either migrate to management (which sucks), change industries or became a private just another entrepenur.
I'm considerably older than that, and would argue from experience that the mistake is in regarding everything new as just another fad.
Often it's good to wait a while and see how things play out with a new technology before deciding whether to invest in it. But you don't want to fall into the bad habit of making such evaluations on prejudice, rather than merit.
Exactly. Use your experience to judge a technology on merit. Does this solve a pain point in a new and interesting way, or is it the same approach in a different language?
That's a pretty big chunk of the internet for a "new trend". My boss is in his 50s and he was the one who started us using node. Every month without fail, he repeats the words of his manager in the 90s: "Java is a fad. We'll all be using c++ again in a year". Don't be that guy.
Not too sure of the numbers on that site. It says AngularJS runs 1.5% of the Internet - 435,718 of 363,398,504 sites, but I thought that we are now over 1 billion websites according to some stats. Another Stat said about 890 million active sites.
Although 435K is nothing to sniff at, wordpress runs over 15 million sites.
> I thought that we are now over 1 billion websites according to some stats.
Accounting for the last 3 quarters, 363m seems accurate[1]. Even if it's not 100% accurate, it's still a good gist.
> wordpress runs over 15 million sites.
Keep in mind that Wordpress is a CMS, and it's older than jQuery. You can also use Wordpress and Angular in parallel, so it's not as if people choose it INSTEAD of angular.
EDIT: I was also referring more towards the top-10k/100k, given that those are ACTUAL websites. I try to avoid stats that include "hello, world. This is my angular2 todo".
> looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecessary
Well, I know that you were just throwing out a random example, but... I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Angular and React. They're actually pretty good, pretty clever solutions to some of the problems the plague web application developers, and help us get a long way to a flexible web environment. Even Node.js may seem "wrong" to those of us whose first experience with a computer was a command-line terminal, but people were saying that Java on the server side was unrealistic 15 years ago. And really, there is a benefit to using the same language on the server as on the client, especially as those two drift closer and closer together.
The problem I see is that the "new devs" (and their 20-year-old "startup founder" bosses) assume that Angular, React and NodeJS, being the new, trendy, hip thing, is all there is and all you need to know. As long as you know those fairly well, the thinking goes, you don't need to know anything about TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, bash, signals, processes, threads... all the things that us old fogeys have spent decades wrestling with. I recently watched a (much younger) colleague of mine reject a candidate because he was misusing the term "route". I asked "you mean like a TCP source route? That's not really that relevant to the UI position he was interviewing for." He seemed incredulous that I didn't "know" that "route" was an "industry-standard" term for a URL (apparently that's what Node.js's Express framework calls URLs - hint, the term "route" never appears in RFC 2616, which actually specifies HTTP). THAT mentality is the frustrating one, and it's all over the place.
I think it goes both ways. If you're new to development, you're soaking up any and all information to a fault. It's an exploratory phase. If you've been around a while, it's easy to become stale. How many trends do you let go by before you're ten iterations behind the trend that sticks?
It's a difficult balance and requires judgment and luck. If you're constantly on the "new language/framework" treadmill, you're wasting a lot of cycles learning fads that won't last, for the N% chance of learning something that ends up big. On the other hand if you stick with refining your knowledge of what you know, you risk getting left in the past. Need both kinds of learning.
