Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field?<p>I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and a painful migration/learning-curve followed. Meanwhile, PHP was gaining traction so as a front-end person, one had to also start learning the LAMP stack in addition to asp and also CSS hacks to get different browsers to render mocks. Then around 2005ish is when AJAX/Web2.0 started gaining traction, one suddenly had to learn the burgeoning frameworks of the time, jQuery/Mootools/Prototype/Dojo/YUI/Sencha (at the time, no one knew which framework was going to win. I spent a lot of time on Dojo before moving to jQuery which started to gain the most traction); at the same time, web sockets still wasn't secure enough so there was also a lot of demand for Flex/Flash/Silverlight. Then around 2008-2009, when HTML5 started becoming more popular, Flex/Silverlight became obsolete; JS mobile frameworks such as PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile grew in favor but later in 2010-2011, they fell out of favor due to "responsive design" frameworks such as Bootstrap. Not to mention native mobile tech stack such as iOS and Android. In addition, around the same time, next-gen JS MVC built on top of jQuery have popped up such as Backbone.js, AngularJS and Ember.js and it's not certain who is going to win out this time in the year of 2014. On top of those, there are now JS AMD loaders (Require.js) and build/integration tools, Grunt that one needs to set up for a project which it seems may also be falling out of favor. Finally, new video/sound/web-socket standards revolving around HTML5 standards is demanding new learning bandwidth.<p>I'm frankly overwhelmed of learning and being exposed to new technologies. The physical draining feeling of learning new keywords to fulfill the same urges is as if I have watched 15 years of porn following from the grainy days of Jenna Jameson on VHS to the heady-days of Internet dial-up gonzo porn of the early 2000's that really explored anal (Gauge, Taylor Rain) to the streaming flash videos of Web 2.0 (Sasha Grey) to the now completely splintered and social-mediafied porno-world with all the mind-numbing categories under the sun (reality, high-art, webcam etc). I'm simply drained and spent.<p>There certainly has been changes in the field in back-end, from Java applets to Spring and Struts to now Scala and Clojure on JVM or transitioning the scripting language from Perl to Python, and adoption of Boost in C++. But I didn't have to re-learn old concepts and the changes were incremental instead of revolutionary; and the whole shift from declarative programming to functional languages is not new as you've learned Haskell/Lisp in undergrad anyways. Whereas what I had learned as a 9 year old on Turbo C doing DOS programming would still apply today, what I learned then for VB4 and HTML/Frontpage is now completely useless.<p>I'm scared for my brain as I get older as I may not have the time nor the energy to devote myself every year to relearn all of these new tech. I'm wondering for people who are above the age of 30, how do you deal with it?