Some short advice from an older programmer: this is the best way to ensure that you are unemployed in 20 years. Art is old (even older than me!). You can specialize in something and have a pretty darn good feeling of assurance that it isn't going to go away before you die.

Programming is a young field. It's changing dramatically from year to year. My first paying job was writing FORTH code. At one point I was writing OO C code on an embedded platform because we didn't have a C++ compiler. Eventually I became an expert in C++ (like an actual expert). A few years ago I went to a job interview and they asked me questions about Boost. I had to tell them that back when I was an expert in C++, the STL hadn't even been written. We were all using RougueWave. I've been paid to work in Perl, Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Go, Javascript and several other languages you will never have heard of because they were proprietary languages written by the companies I work for. I've built embedded systems, real time systems, distributed systems and now I'm trying to fix 10 year old Ruby on Rails code.

The thing is that none of the stuff I do is really all that different. It's just the details that change. Every time I learn something that is truly different, I always find a way to apply it to what I'm doing (if you look above you will notice a huge hole where functional programming should be... it's getting filled).

This field is about learning every day. If you want to be more than average and you want to stay that way for more than 10 years, then you have to accept that you will be spending all of your time learning. And making.

HTH!