Absolutely. But now's different... and someone who's
programmed in C since the 90s is going to be really upset
when they sign up for a startup and they're coding in Ruby.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that "Ruby" in that sentence is a proxy for any of the "newish" langauges that are out there. If we can go with that assumption...
Well, let' see; as somebody who started programming in the 90's with C and C++, I would say that your assertion is simply not true. Maybe some people are dinosaurs and don't change with the times, but I made the switch from (primarily) C/C++ to (primarily) Java about 2002, and started dabbling in Erlang and Ruby about 2008, and am doing a lot of work in Groovy now, while spending some time learning Scala and Clojure.
And I've written some Python and Ruby as well. So no - based on my experience (and observations of colleagues about my age) I don't think it holds that somebody who was doing C/C++ in the 90's is necessarily a fossil who won't be interested in doing Ruby (or whatever).
To be fair though, I was just starting in programming in the 90's, so I may be younger than whatever stereotypical character you had in mind by saying that. <shrug /> I still think it's dangerous to generalize in this fashion though.
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Well, let' see; as somebody who started programming in the 90's with C and C++, I would say that your assertion is simply not true. Maybe some people are dinosaurs and don't change with the times, but I made the switch from (primarily) C/C++ to (primarily) Java about 2002, and started dabbling in Erlang and Ruby about 2008, and am doing a lot of work in Groovy now, while spending some time learning Scala and Clojure.
(Speaking of which, there's a TriJVM Hack Night tonight, for anybody in the RTP area! http://www.meetup.com/TriJVM/calendar/13771811/ )
And I've written some Python and Ruby as well. So no - based on my experience (and observations of colleagues about my age) I don't think it holds that somebody who was doing C/C++ in the 90's is necessarily a fossil who won't be interested in doing Ruby (or whatever).
To be fair though, I was just starting in programming in the 90's, so I may be younger than whatever stereotypical character you had in mind by saying that. <shrug /> I still think it's dangerous to generalize in this fashion though.