Ask HN: What is the best technology to learn right now?

What are you looking to do? If you're interested in web development, I highly recommend learning either Ruby and Ruby on Rails, or Python and Django. You do mention that you "want to learn building something from scratch" though, in which case I wouldn't rely on a framework like Rails or Django.

Have you thought at all about Go (http://golang.org)? It's very similar to C with a great concurrency model. It works well for web servers and, for the most part, makes you work from the bottom up.

"What are you looking to do?"

This is the right question.

I'm guessing from reading your question, that you want to build websites without using Drupal/Joomla underneath? (Rather than, say, build mobile apps or robots or hardware?)

Firstly, decide what you want those websites to so - then ask yourself if you _really_ want to build all the bits Drupal/Jooma give you to start with – the answer to that is not often "Yes – I want to implement a CMS from scratch!" (though sometimes it is as a learning tool, if you want to run a website, building on a whole bunch of other people's work - particularly leveraging their past security mistakes - is almost _always_ worthwhile.)

If you can articulate clearly what you want the website to do - it'll be much easier for people to recommend "a good stack" for that task. If your website idea is for a web interface to MatLab, the answers will be quite different than if your idea requires a Hadoop cluster running on a petabyte of data.

I'll throw my hat in here for learning Clojure. It's a modern Lisp that runs on the JVM, with a great community and awesome libraries. (For example, https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse) As others have mentioned, it all comes down to what you really want to do. I use Clojure both professionally (for web development, statistical computing/analytics software, natural language processing) and for fun on a daily basis. It's the only language I've yet to come across in my career that work doesn't make boring. I relish every opportunity I get to code in Clojure, because after solving every problem in it I end up with a DSL (domain specific language) that I can extend and mold to the problem as I learn more about it, and honestly I find that addicting. I can't recommend it enough, even if you just use it for fun occasionally. At worst, you'll have learned a Lisp and can judge its merits for yourself. At best, you'll experience what I have: infatuation that I hope never goes away. It's been about a year now since I first learned it, and I probably code at least 3-4 hours a day in it. My love has not abated in the slightest, it has only increased. Give it a shot, you may like it!

Can't go wrong with JavaScript.

There isn't any one stack, language or framework that is the best technology to learn.

My suggestion would be to go with any one of many stacks, learn the basics like MVC on server and the client, working with HTTP, writing usable html and css, responsive sites, Working with ORMs, SQL and NoSQL db etc.

Then once you've learnt the basics, learning the another, framework, stack or language becomes quite easy because the basics pretty much remain the same.

In regards to mobile there are only 2 choices either Android Java or iOS Objective-C . Neither one is better than the other right now, So if you own a Mac you can learn either, if you don't, well the choice is obvious. (PS: Windows mobile, BB are okay, I personally don't recommend)

If you are looking for more conclusive help.

Learn node.js if you already know javascript, because you don't need to learn 2 languages while building a site.

But don't limit yourself with that, once you get decent with node, try to do python + django or ruby on rails in the side.

And then you can probably move on to go-lang or a Jvm Language.

Be sure to use at least one SQL and NoSQL db.

PS: (Personal Opinion) For the love of god stop using PHP.