Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. It does matter in so far products come and go and you don't want to acc

Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. It does matter in so far products come and go and you don't want to accumulate knowledge on a product that's going to disappear from the market. I worked with SGI IRIX from 1991-1996. The company has since gone bankrupt twice and IRIX has disappeared from the market. All the knowledge I accumulated on IRIX is worth nothing because it's no longer in demand. Practically noone still has IRIX machines in production. In 1996, I switched to Linux. It had a vibrant community and you could feel it's growing rapidly. Turns out that knowledge is still valuable. So it's really important for engineers to keep a close eye on the marketplace: If something's getting out of business or out of fashion, stop investing time in it. Instead, be on the lookout for stuff that's growing. In general, open source stuff has a longer lifetime because it can be forked if need be, wheras proprietary stuff is often problematic as companies change their mind on a whim. HP/WebOS is a recent example.