I think with the ending of your article it got more into the direction that you state here. People should experiment, try out new things and don't be afraid of

I think with the ending of your article it got more into the direction that you state here. People should experiment, try out new things and don't be afraid of new stuff. Learning is always good as long as it gets reflected upon and learning is seldom useless. But the tone you set at the beginning is harsh and it does not feel like you spend a lot of time with more experienced developers. They are often so experienced because they didn't stop learning. And then the whole article has some anecdotal feeling. Everybody had different experiences with different communities, I for myself had the feeling that many researchers at the university often are only interested in their specific topic. While all my programming colleagues did tons of other stuff where they had to learn things like brewing, cooking, playing instruments and so on. But now I work in an environment with researchers from the humanities and they're overly exited about digital research methods and they invest a lot of energy into learning those. On the other hand, the last time I attended a meeting of Nodejs people I saw a presentation about a new cool framework for restful APIs that used experimental features of Nodejs and the presenter stated that he used it while developing a backend for a random client. I'm pretty sure the client would have liked a bit of grumpiness against new frameworks there. At last, a lot of innovation is driven by big companies. Think about Andrei Alexandrescu and his work at Facebook or Simon Peyton Jones at Microsoft Research (only to name a few).