>If you have a long work history, and if you are good at something, there's a good chance soon the thing you're good at will be replaced by something you're not

>If you have a long work history, and if you are good at something, there's a good chance soon the thing you're good at will be replaced by something you're not good at. We know that doesn't happen for everything, but the problem is that it isn't somewhat predictable. We're pretty much in a lottery until the industry becomes insensitive to new tools which could take decades or more and we all have our own opinions on the safe bets and the risky bets. Maintaining legacy code sucks but it will at least get better because in two decades, the legacy code then will still have decent tools supporting it. I look forward to maintaining .Net 4.5 code in particular with visual studio 2013/15, despite that visual studio 2030 would be available. The IDE for my current legacy code responsibilities has a blazing white (#FFF) background with small font, non-monospaced black (#000) text. Kill me. It's to the point now that if you gamble on investing time in new languages/tech, you have to plan to be out of a job while you retrain if something happens to your corner of the industry. Don't get me wrong though, churn like this is good because it's evolutionary. A new language isn't exciting any more because there's so many of them, but when one does make everyone excited, it's easier to see if it's worth the time. Eventually we'll get to the point where the idea of making a new programming language just isn't worth it because our normal set of tools are just so damn good.