Ask HN: Is ruby/rails still a good bet? What else should I learn?

I've worked with ruby and rails (and other ruby frameworks) for many years now, mostly for backend works, and I love them. It's the only language I'm really fluent with and I'm thinking about looking to some more languages to deeply learn and experiment, to avoid that one day ruby won't be needed anymore and . I'd still like to be on the web development

Which languages and frameworks do think are good bets? Javascript (nodejs, angular/ember, and many more)? Go? Which others?

With all the client javascript frameworks I'm also starting to wonder if we'll ever need backend anymore or if it'll be just built as "premade blocks" and bringing all the focus to the frontend

There's always going to be a backend, for security reasons if anything.

I've shied away from front-end (read Javascript) development because of it's fragmented ecosystem. Although I've taken an interest in Clojurescript recently...

As for a new language I'd recommend Elixir. It's functional which will introduce a new way of thinking and similar enough to syntax to Ruby.

Dave Thomas who wrote the original PickAxe book has recently released a book on Elixir.

I think many people will jump to Golang from interpreted languages for performance and memory consumption reasons, which in conjunction with lowest learning curve among modern languages and easiest way to deploy will give Golang an advantage.

I'm a ruby & rails developer, and I love them both as well. They're good for a lot of things and are generally enjoyable to work with. My side project is a rails app and I wouldn't have it any other way. I think you'll find the day that ruby isn't needed or used anymore is far, far away. php is still around, as is java and perl. As long as developers go to it and use it, it'll still be used. And rails is still one of the top web frameworks out there.

Javascript would be a good bet. that's what I have been meaning to focus on as well. It compliments rails development, and opens the door to other JS frameworks that you may or may not use, and other things like node or even unity.

And by extension, learning those front-end frameworks (like angular) would be good too. Some shops that run rails have something like that in the front end. But knowing JS makes those frameworks more approachable regardless.

JS frameworks, single page apps... they're a way to go, but they aren't replacing rails by any measure. Just more options for implementation, which is whats great about the web. But in the end it's just another way to build a site. Worth mentioning is that there have been some high profile shops that tried to go fully embrace that idea (everything in the front end) but ended up reverting back to server rendering and sprinkling with JS.

Go is great if you've got google level problems, but I wouldn't want to write code in that unless I had an actual need that played to Go's strengths. If i can do it with ruby, i totally will.

So, I'd say ruby and ruby on rails are still good bets, especially if you're trying to build something yourself. But it's really up to you and your priorities and what you're willing to bend on. You could learn .net and php and do work for shops that use them in their codebase, and that's a way to go. You could learn objective-c and write apps for iOS. It's really a matter of what you want to do, what tools exist for doing that, and which one you prefer.

Coming from perl and php, i have never loved anything the way i love ruby and ruby on rails. It was well worth the years it took me to understand and master them both, and the associated knowledge (testing,html5,css3,etc). It's hard for me to see myself using anything else.

In my opinion Rails is the fastest way to build web applications, and the best framework for iterating as you react to new business knowledge. I don't see that changing soon.

Investing in a JS framework seems like a natural complement to your existing skills. Angular & Ember are great fits with Rails. I also like Knockout, which has an easier learning curve.

Another great fit would be Chef, which would leverage your Ruby skills and let you improve how you're deploying the Rails apps you're building.

If you don't have a lot of experience in low-level languages, I'd explore those for the learning. C is a lot of fun and very different than Ruby. iOS would be a practical choice, and apps make very rewarding side projects, although it might be a big change of focus for you. If you want to stay on the server side, I'd find something you can optimize with C or Rust: some critical code, or maybe a Postgres stored procedure.