Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

> How did you touch so many different languages, was it only on personal side-projects or did you learn on the job ?

Mostly in my free time yes. But I've also written tools I use in my job now. With Clojure I've written a data integration/migration tool that I use directly in the REPL. In Rust a small automation tool that fetches some APIs and puts the data into a PDF (because the document has to be printed and signed by hand).

> I'm afraid learning too many different languages just for fun would be detrimental on my main "job" language, like I'd forget the main patterns. But probably not.

I get the feeling but it is completely the other way around. You get a better understanding of languages and programming in general and many concepts are language agnostic. The next you thing you learn gets easier because you know what questions to ask.

Learning Clojure helped me write better JS, you can even compile it to JS and integrate it into a JS application as well.

Rust teaches me to write better imperative code. Allocation and lifetimes for example are language agnostic concepts once you see behind the abstractions. Also with WASM you get to use Rust from other languages like JS and even PHP.

Tips/opinion:

- I don't learn a new language that doesn't challenge me in some qualitative new way. For example if you know Java, there is no point in learning C# in depth except you are looking for a specific job. You can almost always directly translate Java concepts to C# concepts and be fine.

- I prefer learning a new language that also lets you do a thing you couldn't do before. For example tapping into a new runtime/community/mindset. Or doing things way faster, or dynamic. Or interacting with a set of libraries that have a different reach.

- Languages itself are not the most important thing. It is what they carry around that is interesting and useful.

- I also prefer learning languages that have some useful interoperability with the ones I already use. The ones I mentioned above are in this category. Another big one would be C. Not a strict rule though.

- As I mentioned: SQL and Regex are probably the most important languages to learn and get a deeper understanding of as a web-dev.

Do you recommend any books / courses that could help give me some sort of curriculum around this knowledge ?

I unfortunately don't know what I don't know, so I'd need a bit of guidance to learn efficiently. Something like http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ maybe ?

I'm a big Rust fan and have been using it for three years at this point. However, I read nicoburns's original recommendation as "It could be fun and intellectually rewarding to learn Rust", not as something they suggested because it's directly applicable to a lot of projects.

Personally I would say learn it because it's one of those languages that changes how you think about programming as a whole and learning it will make you a better programmer in every language.

That said, I think Rust shows the most promise in a few places:

1. Pretty much anywhere you'd historically use C or C++.

2. WASM

Because Rust can expose C style FFIs you can use it to speed up hot code paths in almost all scripting languages(Python, Ruby, PHP, JS etc). This can be very useful because it allows you to keep most of your code in the scripting language that you and your collaborators are familiar with, while benefiting from Rust's strengths too.

For WASM I think Rust is currently the best choice, it has excellent tooling to work with the web, it's by far the most approachable suitable language for someone who already knows JS, and it doesn't have a big runtime or GC which makes many languages non-starters for the WASM usecase.

Some people would tell you it's a good choice for general purpose backend and there is an ecosystem around that, but I would say if that is your goal Rust offers nothing that Go doesn't do better or at least as well.

Thank you for your feedback, it is very appreciated. Some answers:

1) I work with my wife at this, so we are a team, though web development is new to us. I got a PhD (math), used to be a backend, and then a data scientist for awhile, but I do not know how to sell these things at all, so we tried web dev, since it seems some people do apparently live off it. I've tried marketing myself as a freelancer in the past and have made literally zero cash from it, so we gave up on that and rebranded as a web dev shop. The rewards seem the exact same, though I can pretend to be a CEO now:)

2) We will check this channel out, thank you. I don't think either of us is strong on design, so this is a valid criticism. It is a goal of ours to improve in this dimension.

3) Neither of us has any contacts who want to buy any software, so we agree with you on the importance of cold selling. We are starting up this process now, and trying to run some ads, but Ecuador has only a 30% online presence anyway, so yeah...

Please keep us in mind if you need anything though, our entire family lives on 300 dollars a month, so I'm quite sure we can undercut virtually any competitor's deal. Thanks:)

I can imagine the impact Clojure had; learning about Lisp had a big impact on my programming journey.

What was it about Go that made your Python code better, though?