Actually, if the OP's way to stay ahead of it is to learn an emerging technology every 7 years or so, it seems the steam-roller is moving quite slowly.
80 - everybody does fortran (57)
- play around with pascal (70), basic (64)
- evaluates Unix and C (73)
- play around with small-talk (80), learn OO
I seems, like the pattern is, to figure out what language/paradigm, that was invented 10 years ago, and just seems to have matured enough, that everybody will be trying to use it/imitate it 10 years down the line :-)
Let's not kid ourselves, AJAX is a very minor technology. It may be widely used these days, but there's not that much to it, conceptually.
It's the kind of thing that even a moderately experienced programmer can understand within 10 minutes, and then have used it successfully another 10 minutes after that.
Asynchronous HTTP requests weren't a new idea in the early 2000s, by any means. I'd used C and Perl libraries that allowed for just that back in the 1990s. The only thing novel about it is that it could be done from the browser, using JavaScript. Really, AJAX is more a testament to how limited the browser and JavaScript are, rather than some great new technology.
80 - everybody does fortran (57) - play around with pascal (70), basic (64) - evaluates Unix and C (73) - play around with small-talk (80), learn OO
I seems, like the pattern is, to figure out what language/paradigm, that was invented 10 years ago, and just seems to have matured enough, that everybody will be trying to use it/imitate it 10 years down the line :-)