I'm turning 50 in a few months. I still enjoy coding; and I expect to be coding for another few decades. One thing I figured out early on is that your choices

I'm turning 50 in a few months. I still enjoy coding; and I expect to be coding for another few decades. One thing I figured out early on is that your choices in languages and tech really matter. There are only so many things you can learn and you have to make some educated bets on things getting traction or not. And if you make the right bets, it's easier to keep your skills fresh and relevant. Some things look fancy and nice and then five years later it's all outdated and obsolete. And some other things go big. Java was one of those things and in 1995, when I was in university, they decided to use it for teaching programming to first year students. So I ended up being a teaching assistant and now have nearly thirty years of experience with the JVM ecosystem. I recognized the signs of the platform and language (especially) going a bit stale about fifteen years ago. It's becoming the Cobol of my generation (plenty of work but not the kind that gets me excited). I realized I needed to move on if I wanted to stay relevant. Since then I've touched a lot of languages. Right now, I do a lot of Kotlin but I keep an eye out for new things. Kotlin was a bit of a bet ten years ago. I fully committed to mastering it six years ago. And at this point it's starting to feel like a good bet. The language is modern, has a lot of momentum and there's lots of interesting stuff happening with the language, compiler, tools, etc. Particularly multi-platform is opening up a lot of possibilities. I've dabbled with other things along the way but never really got the feeling that mastering that stuff was worth my time. E.g. Ruby was interesting but it's now mainly used by people in their forties (i.e. my age). Younger generations seem to not be interested in it. Same with things like Scala. Lots of stuff still happening with both of course but it seems that they are both a bit past their peak. Python on the other hand keeps surprising me by not getting replaced with something else. I kind of like the language and have done some things with it over the years. And I like that they are clearing out technical debt (like the GIL) and keeping the language fresh. I work with some twenty year old interns that know and love it. People will be doing Python long after I die. That's a bet I didn't make but it would have been a good one. And not too late obviously. I know enough python to be able to jump in a project and use it. I've done so on a few projects in recent years. It's a very approachable language; kind of by design.