I think the massive amount of churn in the web world is the exception rather than the rule. If you learned C programming 40 years ago it would still be relevant today. Even Android is almost 10 years old now.
If you learned Ada, Modula-2, Pascal, or BASIC, though, it might not be so relevant. COBOL, FORTRAN, Smalltalk, and Perl 5 are somewhat useful, akin to, maybe, jQuery in the web world.
You can use Perl instead of PHP, Python or Ruby. They all have their strengths and weaknesses but overall they are very similar when it comes to usefulness.
Point taken, but I feel all those languages had good runs. Modula-2 might have had less commercial success but still holds some intellectual interest. I sort of got sick of the web treadmill in 2013 as it felt like "learn a new toolkit every 18 months" and am primarily interested in something with longevity in that niche.
Sure, but jQuery from ten years ago is still jQuery. What iteration is Angular on now? Its doesn't have the churn that more recent web frameworks have.
