Sure, when I was younger I remember trying every single package from my distro or that was featured in slashdot or that appeared on freshmeat.net etc. These day

Sure, when I was younger I remember trying every single package from my distro or that was featured in slashdot or that appeared on freshmeat.net etc. These days my default attitude toward a new piece of tech is a shrug, and the list of techs that I (wilingfully or not) do not learn and skip over is becoming larger and larger with time. I do not believe that's because I'm becoming lazy though; fatigue sure is a thing, but we're living at a time when our universe is expanding faster than the speed of learning anyway. And I believe you too are staying ignorant of most of novelties. Do I stick to my tools longer than necessary before acknowledging true progress? Possibly, but not always. I've been pushing ruby over perl/php/python, ngnx over apache, I adopted systemd quite early for some of its practical merits, I pushed for containerd over docker, for nix then guix over Debian, and PL wise I've enthusiastically explored mercury, ATS, and rust way before it was a thing (then decided against it). So although it's true that I would not feel confident in a conversation with young JS programmers I could still name a long list of interesting new techs they have never heard about! :) One of the hardest thing in a software dev's job used to be to learn to say "no" to product-designers and management. Nowadays it's to say "no" to shiny new techs. Many times this pays off, since most of tech novelties shine only for a brief moment before being superseded by another. The price to pay is to arrive a bit late to the party from time to time. One have to be very passionate and picky to not end up stranded in an isolated ecosystem. You mentioned IDEs many time. Beware that they are often times such isolated ecosystems. You would not believe how strongly java devs thought no one would ever need to venture outside of Netbean... No I mean Eclipse. No, VScode. Meanwhile, I'm still wondering what problem those are trying to solve; do I have a problem I haven't diagnosed? Must not be the speed of writing or navigating code though, given I'm usually amongst the fastest around. In programming as well as in real life, things own you as much as you own them.