I often hear this sentiment that new languages and frameworks du jour pop up every week, and that past an age a fellow just wants to learn a single reliable stack and collect a weekly paycheck.

Am I the only one who just hasn't experienced this feeling? There used to be Rails/Django and jQuery. Now there's Node and React. Both revolve around extremely simple ideas. Spend an afternoon reading the React docs, and you'll know everything you need. Take another afternoon after that and learn Redux. If you have another few afternoons, learn Clojure, and see what the Lisp folks have gotten going with reagent/re-frame. There isn't that much to keep up with.

It's the same with complaints about JS having too many transpiled dialects. These dialects make life easier. There are good ideas in them. For example, Livescript is wonderfully concise and elegant, at no cost of readability once you grok Livescript. It makes your code more readable and faster to write. How is this a bad deal?

I sometimes wonder if people are just annoyed that they need to learn new paradigms at all. It's not like ours shift at an especially fast rate.