But at the end of the day, software engineers are technologists. Our job is to create and consume technology. Being afraid of new technology is counter-productive.
(emphasis added)
That was bad. Normally I try not to have such typos, but it is Monday.
One good question to ask yourself when evaluating a framework is this:
If the project/company dies out tomorrow, and we're tied to this thing, can we take it in-house and pick up maintenance?
If the answer to that is no, not even long enough to migrate to something else, then boy, you'd better be damn sure that the team that develops it isn't going to go away or lose interest. Hence my skepticism with many, many Javascript "framework of the week" projects. There's just far too many out there that have died out after a year or two for me to blithely accept whatever the new hotness is.
I'm shocked.
I use emacs and avoid IDEs.
That said, I have no interest in the emacs vs. vi debate. I don't care what tools you use, as long as you don't do things in a way that force me to use specific tools (e.g. enterprise environments that becomes IDE-dependent).
As for me, I don't like mindless churn. This industry desperately needs to improve. It's running at about 5% (if that) of its real potential. But the constant fire drilling that comes with moving from one well-sold crappy technology to another well-sold crappy technology is really irritating, and it's part of why so many good programmers tend to move up into management.
Analyse critically and deliberately. Be conscious of decisions.