An historical perspective, which older programmers at their best bring to a project, is important in my view. When you look at the history of software systems you see that the better technology rarely wins in the marketplace. A lot of things contribute to the success of one system over another--technical excellence is not one of them.

Also, the significance of fad and novelty cannot be underestimated. When I see yet another new language or framework that is only trivially different from the existing ones, yet touted as the next big thing I can only grumpily roll my eyes.