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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I'm halfway through Michael Hartl's RoR tutorial (IMHO, it's very good) and so your comment is a little disheartening. What are the top one or two technologies (aside from just Javascript) that you would learn today?

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I would finish that tutorial. RoR shows you what a cohesive approach can do to a framework and it'll get you used to good design patterns that can serve you elsewhere.

I would then move on to learn about elixir and Phoenix if I were in your position. Phoenix is similar enough to the good parts of rails but all the really nice stuff is way better than rails. ActionCable in rails is a joke compared to what elixir can deliver.

Finish that tutorial, understanding Rails will help you undertand better other frameworks that were inspired by Rails.

Or, if you ask me, learn Elixir + Phoenix. I'm betting part of my future career and my company on it, because I believe that it's the future. But Go, Clojure or Scala are great choices for web development as well these days.

Elixir is hardly visible in the jobs market. At least if Indeed.com is to be believed. It's too niche. Clojure is at least as good as Elixir, if not better, and has failed to gain widespread adoption after 8 years since 1.0 so I don't see Elixir going anywhere. There's just too much competition.

Can you recommend one or two language + framework combinations that might be a better choice than RoR?

Elixir/Phoenix, Clojure/Luminus, ClojureScript/Macchiato and Scala/Play are arguably better than Rails if you really grok FP but they don't have the community, maturity and adoption that Rails has enjoyed for a long time. If you're ok with OO monoliths Rails is hard to beat.

Golang, Java (and a 3rd would be Rust)

Those are just languages though. They don't really compare to RoR. For the record, I think Ruby is a wonderful language. Python is still my go-to scripting language, but I do admire the expressiveness of Ruby when written by people that know what they are doing.

I have a fair bit of Java experience but it isn't current (I did Tomcat-based stuff).

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