The kids have no cost of switching to something new because they probably don't know much already. As you get older, re-learning everything 6 months feels weir

The kids have no cost of switching to something new because they probably don't know much already. As you get older, re-learning everything 6 months feels weird since any random 14 year old can know as much (or more) than you do about the new system. Your API-level experience gets invalidated rapidly, so it's almost better to start from scratch, which only the unknowing youths can do. Then there's a whole "stake you claim" mentality. Want to be the best C person in the world? You can't. It's too wide spread. What to be the best Go person? Sure, fight that battle for your own glory since it's new and you can take part in everything. Lack of education/experience also creates a great breeding ground for new, duplicate, half-implemented versions of things that already exist. The older a developer gets, the more they see things they already know re-implemented as completely new but with unfamiliar interfaces they'll have to re-learn again every 6 months. It's a huge waste of human capacity to always be "new new new" instead of creating a stable and reasonably extensible base to work from. But, at the same time, we don't want to be stuck on Perl 4 and CORBA forever. There's a tradeoff between building new things for advancing the future versus building new things just because you think you're better than all the previous research/experience that has come before you. See the case of Cathedral v. Bazaar.