It seems many people either think older coders are experienced and wise, or old and stagnant. Younger coders likewise either young, foolish "wheel re-inventers"

It seems many people either think older coders are experienced and wise, or old and stagnant. Younger coders likewise either young, foolish "wheel re-inventers" or up-to-date and ambitious. So far, I've not seen any pattern to back this up. I've worked with a few coders in their mid-20s that knew PHP or Java very well, but refuse to learn a front-end framework or Node JS. They act as though the burden of learning a new stack when they've already learned what they know from school was too much to ask. Likewise, I've worked with coders in their 40s and 50s who still love learning new technologies, and are more than happy to learn the new "Javascript framework of the week", especially if they see the benefits it provides over what they currently use. I'm in my early 30s and have a strong distaste for Electron, but I know a mid-40s coder who loves Electron and would never code a desktop app any other way. I find myself reading about Smalltalk and NEXTstep and am continually impressed with the solutions of the generations before me (and their respect for their users' resources) while the coder in his 50s I've worked with loves that we live in a time where trading RAM and CPU for easy maintainability is the norm. What bothers me isn't just the ageism, but also the absolutism based on anecdotes. It seems to me that the same person who would dismiss an older coder based on age, is also the kind of person who would, say, "never hire someone with C# experience even if they have Python experience, because we use Python and anybody with C# experience is slow and inflexible" (real thing a manager once said) or "never hire someone who prefers to use Sublime Text because we use a 'real IDE' like Netbeans" (again, thing a manager once said). Hire the right man or woman for the job. Pick the right tool for the task at hand. Be open to new technologies and using them for their strengths, but also learn from the good and bad things of the past. None of this seems that difficult to me, yet it seems is a continual problem in the field.