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Comment by dguaraglia | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big Python evangelist for reasons lost to history, but even I would recommend learning Ruby on Rails if you want to make yourself marketable. I'm not sure how much of a market there is out there right now for people with Rails experience, but it never hurts to learn something new.

Besides, whether you chose to use Rails, or Sinatra, or move to some other language, as long as you are doing web development you'll be able to apply the concepts learned. So I say go for it!

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I've noticed there seem to be a lot more remote Rails jobs than anything else (other than Javascript). I know some Ruby and am also thinking about Rails, despite my preference for Python- there just so few Python or Django remote jobs unfortunately I need to broaden my horizons.

The problem is that the maturity of the Rails market means that most Rails positions require X number of years experience - I can certainly pick up Rails but those years of experience have to come from somewhere.

EDIT: not entirely true, as there are a lot of PHP jobs. However these include bottom-feeder Wordpress gigs and generally pay much lower salaries than other languages, right or wrong.

From previous comments, it looks like you're in the UK? Ping me.

I know a few other languages, they just aren't nearly as marketable as Ruby. I've learned Lua, Scheme, I know a little bit of Julia but most of the stdlib is over my head mathematically. I've fallen in love with Ruby because it seems to be how I 'think' about problems. I just never really had the motivation to learn Rails, I always hear people complaining about it, I've never needed a website or anything, I don't know. It just never happened.

Like the parent commenter, I'm also a huge fan of Python. I've recently started my journey learning web dev using Scala. It's a pretty hot language right now, what with the rise of big data and ML (see Spark for example). It allows you to use existing Java libraries, yet there still is a considerable number of high-quality libraries written in Scala. The stack I've chosen is Scala + Play + Slick, but there are several popular options.

You should look at Elixir/Phoenix - I think it's the next rails and will be the new hotness in a year or so :)

I'm personally a fan of Clojure which is an excellent language with excellent tooling and a smart and friendly community

+1 You should look at Elixir/Phoenix

Sincere question: Don't you feel the lack of static typing?

We've begun to use Elixir and Phoenix at work, and it's far nicer to work with than Rails - there's far less magic going on, and being functional, there is much less mutable state to keep in your head. That said, I still miss a rich type system. Typespecs can get you some of the way, but they're unreliable, and there's no support for parametrically polymorphic functions so far as I can see, which limits the usefulness of protocols for typechecking purposes.

Static typing is not a single issue. It is several.

From a high-level-language standpoint, static typing is a crutch. It isn't necessary, but it forces you to do things "the right way"... according to some definitions of the right way. It is possible to make mistakes without static typing that you would not make with it... but if you're careful you can also do some good things without it that you can't do with it. It all depends on whether you feel more comfortable with taking control or you feel the need for some restrictions to keep you "in line".

From a purely performance standpoint, there is no question: static typing compiles/interprets to faster code.

> From a high-level-language standpoint, static typing is a crutch

I see types as a high-level design tool. They allow me to reason about a domain, and figure out how to structure things at a high level before delving into the implementation. Yes, performance is a great side-benefit, but it is not always the driving factor.

I've put it on my list of things to learn - it looks great. Looks like a pleasure to write.

As someone who used to do (still do a bit) C and Ruby for embedded stuff but now does RoR for an ecommerce site, webdev can be a soul-crushing mind-numbing bore, but there are jobs and it pays. Rails is decent, especially if you are working on a site where server costs are not a significant factor in site costs. It is worth learning.

In germany there are like ten rails jobs.

There's a huge Rails community in Berlin and hundreds of jobs. Not sure about the rest of the country.

Germany is mostly Java or heavy embedded stuff. I mean one of the biggest shop is probably Zalando which uses Java/Scala/Python. And as far as I know otto.de is on the JVM, too.

I find interesting how some countries (or rather, the industries in those countries) seem to specialize in certain stacks. Back when I lived in Brazil, Delphi used to be huge there, even though it had already kind of died everywhere else. Argentina seemed to be doing mostly Java. I guess it has to do with the kind of consulting companies that hire the bulk of the software engineers in the country.

It'd be great to get something like the TIOBE index, but split by country, although I guess I'd try to bias it a bit heavier towards commercially developed LOCs.

And from what I heard: PHP.

Maybe that's how I hired three German developers working remotely for my SF/London based company?

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