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Comment by zorr | Hacker News Reader

I would go for either Rust or Kotlin.

Rust because it's a systems/native language and seems to be the go-to language for new projects that would have been started in C++ some years ago.

Kotlin because it's a nice modern language that can be used both on the frontend (Android and lately some iOS and Desktop, sometimes even web) and on the backend. Yes, it's a typical OO language that inherits some of the "ExtremeOO" properties from Java but it fixes some of Java's (former) issues as well. Having the whole Java/Maven library ecosystem available is also a big plus in my book.

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Interesting, I was going to come here to say the exact same thing. Rust if you need the performance/low level features, Kotlin if not. I think Kotlin's niche overlaps with Go but just so much more pleasant to use, I really wish it were more popular.

+1 to this and mostly because I'm getting more interested in more formal functional programming after 20+ years of mostly working with OOP - and both of these allow strong FP without requiring hard commitment to it like with Haskell

I've only heard good things about Rust and it seems to have all the LTS needed to actually improve life over C

Honestly I think something like LISP with a different CPU/GPGPU architecture is probably the future, or maybe a better way to say it is, we probably need computers to be more like lambda architecture than we have now if we want to fully utilize the power of large data architectures (I'm avoiding the term AI in purpose here).

You would recommend a language below Scratch and a language below COBOL (Kotlin) on the TIOBE index?

How is a language's ranking on an arbitrary list at all relevant?

You may disagree with the way the TIOBE index is compiled, but it's hardly "arbitrary."

If you are using a popularity contest to choose your tooling you are choosing your tooling incorrectly.

Also it seems it would be helpful for you to read this: https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

OP is asking specifically about being highly employable. In that context, popularity is pretty directly relevant.

Yes, I would and if you want to use the TIOBE index as a guide you can use the following reasoning to justify the choice:

Rust is the spiritual successor for #2 (C) and #4 (C++), while Kotlin is that for #3 (Java). All three of those are showing their age and in a downwards trend.

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