Back around 2000 I was studying graphics programming as a hobby, and the DirectX APIs were moving pretty quickly at that time. It seemed as if a new version was

Back around 2000 I was studying graphics programming as a hobby, and the DirectX APIs were moving pretty quickly at that time. It seemed as if a new version was dropping every 6 months. I got tired of playing catch-up to Microsoft and switched to OpenGL. Much better experience; got code running much faster. I saw the same pattern begin with .NET; you had to keep playing catchup and buying into the New Hotness. I realized that this seemed to be a Microsoft strategy: obsolete the old knowledge and watch the developers pay money for the new hotness. I'm not saying that MS needs to be static, but there appears to me to be a deep seated instability in their approach, which implies pretty heavy retraining every five years. Contrast this against C++, which has been more or less standard since the mid-90s, especially for the common cases. I get tired of running on a tech treadmill. Learning how to crap out the same concept in yet another language (much the same as the ones I already have used) has nil interest for me. I am tired of wasting my life figuring out the subtleties of a Java clone, or a C++ clone, or a Perl clone, or... etc. I look for a stable, long-term language, on fairly stable core technologies, so I can build really amazing new technology without throwing it out and restarting due to the New Hotness. I personally have picked Common Lisp for my long-term code and projects. Others might pick C++, Perl 5, or Fortran. I look over new languages and technologies as they come out and see if they have something meaningfully innovative that really merits learning and/or switching. Some do. Most don't. Haskell looks like it has a good future right now.