I'm a systems developer so I'm used to working with "dead" languages but I'm skeptical that someone still programming like they're in the 1980s will do anywhere

I'm a systems developer so I'm used to working with "dead" languages but I'm skeptical that someone still programming like they're in the 1980s will do anywhere near as good a job as someone who has continuously updated their skill set. For example, semaphores have been around for 45 years but anyone using semaphores like they did in 1970 would be in for a rude surprise. Any modern kernel developer worth his or her salt knows about working around course-grained locking to avoid slowing their kernel to a crawl.