At my second serious job in the late '90s, my manager was the programmer who wrote the linker for Cray unix when he was there. Great programmer. Now I'm the old

At my second serious job in the late '90s, my manager was the programmer who wrote the linker for Cray unix when he was there. Great programmer. Now I'm the old guy who intimidates they young'ns. Being a good programmer has very little to do with following current trends in tools. Tools can be learned, especially if they don't require a fundamental shift in thinking. I've lived through a project of watching lifer COBOL programmers involved in transitioning their systems to Java. Some simply couldn't learn Java at all, it was such an alien way of thinking. Some of them quit or retired, some became analysts for the project, because they understood the business that was encoded in those bazillion lines of twenty year old COBOL. Now I'm starting to see a generation of early Java legacy apps rewritten in Node or whatever. What goes around...