I think average surgeon's skills are probably pretty sharp (pun intended), however, in my experience the knowledge of a regular small-town GP's indeed usually is not very up-to-date.
Regarding the OP's question: new hip languages and frameworks evolve way faster than human body, and "it works" is more important in medicine than "iterate and fail fast" (hopefully:)
My personal theory is also that partially the high expectations are due to open source / hacker ethos (there's generally no medical open source movement, or in any profession outside of IT AFAIK, at least on such scale). The cycle goes like this:
- some folks want to do something cool for fun and/or to get some fame for showing it to the public, or get famous for inventing a known lib/framework
- companies see they're smart and hire them
- other companies follow the trend, and require open source contributions or at least building space shuttle over the weekend
- a number of devs don't want to lag behind, so they join the bandwagon, and they create even more cool stuff and even more open source MVC frameworks
- now, the cycle reinforces itself, everyone is doing cool stuff and contributing to opensource, if you don't, you're excluded
I don't think software is all that exceptional in this regard. Any profession has certain visible achievements that distinguish its world-class members. For software, it's cool open source projects; for chefs, it's creating a great restaurant; for doctors, it's publishing influential novel research.
In each of these fields, the visible achievement isn't exactly the same as great performance in the field. You can get unlucky in scientific research and end up with nothing publishable; you can cook mediocre food but market it really well; or you can create the latest trendy build system instead of just mastering Gnu Make.
The misleading thing may be the assumption that most successful open source software projects are done by unpaid hackers on their own time. Perhaps that used to be the case, but many of the hot open source projects in recent history -- from Rails to Docker to React to Swift -- are built on the clock by successful programmers employed at big and small companies. But software is unusual in that serious contributions can be made by people without any institutional support.
Regarding the OP's question: new hip languages and frameworks evolve way faster than human body, and "it works" is more important in medicine than "iterate and fail fast" (hopefully:)
My personal theory is also that partially the high expectations are due to open source / hacker ethos (there's generally no medical open source movement, or in any profession outside of IT AFAIK, at least on such scale). The cycle goes like this:
- some folks want to do something cool for fun and/or to get some fame for showing it to the public, or get famous for inventing a known lib/framework
- companies see they're smart and hire them
- other companies follow the trend, and require open source contributions or at least building space shuttle over the weekend
- a number of devs don't want to lag behind, so they join the bandwagon, and they create even more cool stuff and even more open source MVC frameworks
- now, the cycle reinforces itself, everyone is doing cool stuff and contributing to opensource, if you don't, you're excluded
edit: fixed typos