Do you think any current programming technology gives this kind of real world advantage? There are many "cool" techs but I don't think they give a real advantage in most cases.

Probably about 10 years ago using Python or Ruby still qualified as "beating the averages", but nowadays I think the "startup tech" has taken over the world so everyone is already using the leaner, simpler and more productive languages and frameworks (instead of say J2EE or C++).

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html