PHP was a godsend, saving me from Perl. I switched to the Dark Side and prefer C# these days, but I still keep an eye on it just because there was some fun stuff I built with it.
Looking at that archived page brings back memories. Since I'd started with PHP/FI and I think I went on until 4.x, I'm pretty sure I saw that announcement when it actually came out.
When LINQ first came out, I personally remember creating some long rants at the bar with my drinking buddies that we didn't need no stinking FP in our OOP.
I now find myself writing half my data processing in LINQ and find myself thankful that I can chain together a few methods on a collection with possible transformation in a line or two rather than having to write 2 or 3 nested loops with all sorts of conditionals.
I'm taking the new things that come up in C# as they come, and even the ones I don't care for, I generally end up using to some extent.
Go with the flow, or pick another language, would be my suggestion.
Since I've never sent a DP to anyone, I think this is hilarious, folks sending them out to people are "obviously" proud of what they're displaying, so I'm not seeing what's the problem here. (tongue in cheek, but I still find the outrage hilarious)
In general though, for me, it's a case of finding out additional tech/science things I wasn't aware about and reading what are generally informed opinions about said things. Sometimes I get to be one of those informed opinions.
That became useful to me when I ran across a post about H3 spatial partitioning. I actually had a use case that I'd been working on using DGGRID for a few months, and that was turning out to be computationally expensive, and I couldn't make it work in near real time for my specific use.
This in turn led me to developing a project I've been working on for a while that has expanded my skill set in a handful of disciplines, and if I hadn't run across H3, I'd probably have thrown away my project as a lost cause.
Back in 2000ish, went to the Phoenix store to get parts to repair a friend's PC that had blown up.
I think it was around 2010, me and Grandpa went to the one in the Dallas area to build a PC "old school" because he'd built his ham radios from tubes and solder, it was time to stay current. Afterwards, he was a bit disappointed at how easy it was. He expected at least a spark from the power supply and we might have to buy new parts. On the other hand, he was pleased to see that the tinkerer and willing to make things was still running through the bloodline.
For the first few years here in CA, it was a great place to look at new toys and occasionally buy them. It was always good for buying a quick phone when one would die late night. Ingress kills phones, man, deal with it.
But yeah, the year before the plague was eerie and empty and "No, we're not closing." and now I'm sad.
One of my projects is using the Dymaxion projection, which H3 uses, and I've found H3 to be a lot faster for my uses. YMMV.