&#62; <i>younger people tend to relate to that which is new and exciting to them</i><p>Although I'm still young (27) ... I'm becoming more and more dismissive of new technologies.<p>Why? Because my experience tells me when something new is just a rehash of some older concept that sucked. That's why I stayed away from SOAP ... learned about CORBA in college and hated it. That's why I stayed away from ASP.NET ... because I first had the pleasure of working with Rails and with PHP (with my own home-backed framework).<p>Of course ... I could instantly see the potential in IPhone ... all those portable devices that fit in your pocket, with  a GPS, a photo-camera, an Internet connection and a single online store that sells apps ... all of which could lead to interesting stuff like augmented reality ... that's love at first sight.<p>I also think that it's a bad idea focusing on grokking technologies. Algorithms, data-structures, math ... these are things that will never be deprecated and where experience matters.