Posted by Schraalhans Keukenmeester on 05/20/07 08:10

At Sat, 19 May 2007 20:20:04 +0300, Rami Elomaa let his monkeys type:

> Toby A Inkster kirjoitti:
>>
>> In 50 years time, a handful of today's programming languages will probably
>> still be in common use, but it's unlikely to be the ones we expect. Don't
>> expect learning a single language to set you up for a life of programming
>> employment. You've got to keep learning new languages and techniques.
>>
>
> This raises an interesting question though. Going a bit off-topic now,
> but I've been wondering if I should start training another language now.
> Over the years I've advanced from C to C++ to Java (plus a little
> assembly) and now I somehow ended up in doing php for a living. It's
> occupying me now, but in 5-10 years maybe not, there might be a new
> language behind the horizon that will be the new trend. Just to keep
> myself busy I actually tried Ruby the other day (or in fact, Ruby on
> Rails) for fun and managed to "hello world", and when I have plenty of
> time I will try it out more. I'm just thinking that the era of php will
> eventually die, and if I don't become a Pointy-Haired Boss by the time,
> I need to know the new language, so what should I be looking at? No one
> can predict the future, but are there any hot new languages on the rise
> that might be worthy of knowing...?

Trying to guess what will become tomorrow's best bet is a rather difficult
and expensive exercise: As long as today's top choices still grow in
popularity I'd spend my time investing in those rather than worry about
the mid-term future. Some of the language fads die out long before they
have become widely used in production, and some non-promising languages
have become incredibly popular. A lot of variables beyond our
control influence this process.

Much more interesting -and often hardly language dependent- is trying to
keep up with the programming concepts in fashion. OOP, MVC, AJAX etc.
Not that you should immediately adopt every new kid on the block. But
knowing what's available helps making the right choices faced with a
new assignment.

If you have a proper programming skill set and enough experience, adopting
a new dialect probably won't be the highest hurdle you'll ever face.

Sh.

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