Absolutely. I sat out the Ruby/Rails hype cycle and am none the worse for it. Life is too short to waste time learning ephemeral tech like Ruby, Node.js, or MongoDB. When considering whether to learn a new language or platform, I ask myself, how long have people been using this, and how long will people likely continue to use it? As a result, I know C, Common Lisp/Elisp, UNIX/POSIX, and a relational database or two very, very well. I suspect I'd be much less happy if I had instead spent time learning how to build single-threaded JavaScript web apps that rely, in 2015, on cooperative multitasking, let alone doing so with other hipster programmers who actually think it's a good idea.
I never bothered learning a newfangled, flavor-of-the-week language like C. As a result, I'm an expert in COBOL and Fortran. I suspect I'm much happier not knowing C.
You know, you're right; there's no such thing as an ephemeral language or platform. Why, look at all new projects started every day in QBasic, Tcl, or Turbo Pascal.
I'm sure people will be building stuff with Ruby forty years from now.
The Ruby/Rails hype cycle started like ten years ago. Rails is one of the most widely used web app frameworks in the market. Ruby's been around for twenty-odd years and has gone from being a niche scripting language to one that's used to power an outrageous amount of big applications. It's not a pissing contest by any means, but calling Ruby and Rails a hype cycle is just inaccurate.
Eh I disagree learning new languages can make you think in different ways. I know Ruby, Shell, C, Javascript and some OCaml and Haskell, each have taught me something that I apply to others.
