Cynical people will see a new fashionable language and dismiss it as a pointless new thing to learn. Eager early adopters will jump right in and swear it's the

Cynical people will see a new fashionable language and dismiss it as a pointless new thing to learn. Eager early adopters will jump right in and swear it's the best thing ever. Look, it even makes program X a one-liner! Both strategies will make suboptimal decisions, but both have their benefits. Sometimes the reason a new language or framework or abstraction or whatever is a bad idea isn't immediately obvious. It takes real experience with something, including the process of learning how to use that thing effectively, to work out when and where it's useful and where it falls down. Cynics are late to see the good. Early adopters are late to see the bad. Hipsters never get around to seeing the bad, or they decide it's irrelevant… until the fashion shifts, anyway. Whether you pick up every new technology that comes out or whether you wait until they've matured and proven themselves, you'll spend some time using less than optimal tools for whatever you're doing. But I don't think that's avoidable. Incidentally, I'm not convinced I truly understand a new tool until I can rant about its shortcomings at length and I've spent enough time with it to be reasonably sure it's not just that my brain hasn't yet warped in the right way for it to make sense. And even then I risk being wrong about it.