If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IfYouHadToStartOverWhatTechnologiesWouldYouLearnIn2014.aspx

by PhilipA • 12 years ago

146 180 12 years ago

gizmo2• 12 years ago

It depends on your goals. If your goal is to do a startup, then the obvious choice is to really master an entire web stack. For instance linux / nginx / python / html / css / javascript.

If you want to do research in computer graphics, then you better learn OpenGL and C++ or .NET. Want to work in embedded systems? C.

Scott's recommendation of C# & Javascript is a solid and pragmatic choice, good for those looking for a safe career in software. But it's certainly not the right choice for everybody, and even 30 years from now there will be plenty of challenging opportunities that have nothing to do with the web or javascript.

shanselman• 12 years ago

Agreed and well-said.

ardfard• 12 years ago

Agreed too for your opinion about how to do a startup. But I want to add C to your full stack suggestion. Sometimes it pays off to know low-level details about your choice of technologies. Almost every important technologies that I know is implemented in C.

gizmo2• 12 years ago

No doubt, knowing C always helps. gdb and strace work where other tools fail.

In order to be a well rounded developer you ideally have familiarity with functional programming, declarative programming, lisp, and a much more. You hit diminishing returns pretty quickly though.

erichocean2• 12 years ago

I'm rewriting our Node.js based server in a combination of C and LuaJIT as we speak. The performance difference is absolutely astounding, in part because our Node.js app relies heavily on compiled modules, and the cost to cross from JavaScript to C++ and back is obscene.

The straight C implementation looks like it'll be over 1000 times faster for our use case, which involves tons of buffer manipulation and usage of compiled modules.

donniezazen• 12 years ago

Can you do without only Python and its framework for programming side? As someone new to programming, I find it mind boggling how folks suggest learning multiple languages. Or does it become natural after you know one language very well.

Kronopath• 12 years ago

It definitely is easier to pick up other languages once you know how to program well in one of them. You start to see the commonalities, the similarities in overall structure, and you can draw comparisons between the languages you already know and the ones you're learning. Learning the first language is the hardest, I'd say.

jafaku• 12 years ago

To give you an example, after having programmed for years with PHP and Javascript, having learned many design patterns, and mastered a few frameworks, I picked up Ruby and RoR for one particular project and didn't have any major troubles. In about 3 days I was programming at full speed again.

Silhouette7• 12 years ago

The thing with programming languages is that while they sometimes look very different cosmetically, they often share similar concepts under the hood.

IMHO, you won't go wrong learning one language reasonably thoroughly as a starting point. In fact, I'd recommend it for several reasons.

However, sooner or later, you'll probably hear that another language might be more useful for another project you want to do, and maybe then you'll learn that second language too. As you do, you'll notice similar ideas cropping up, even if they go by different names or use different syntax.

As your experience grows, you start to think of each programming language as being roughly in this family or that family in one respect, and maybe being like these other languages or those other languages in some other respect. You also probably notice more what still makes each language distinctive, whether it's a few idioms that make writing a certain style of code easier, or maybe a couple of unique features that aren't widely available in other languages that are otherwise quite similar.

In the long term, it's these distinctions that make it useful to know several different languages. Even then, most of the languages you know will draw most of their tools from the same toolbox, and learning when to use a hammer and when to use a screwdriver will be more important than which brand of hammer or screwdriver you buy.

adestefan• 12 years ago

If your goal is to do a startup...

I'd only amend this to say "web startup." While HN is very web-centric there are a lot of other startups out there that have nothing to do with the web.

cmdkeen• 12 years ago

I'd actually recommend a slight variation on the C# javascript combo - Typescript instead. There are all sorts of tools coming out that allow you to generate Typescript interfaces from your C# giving you really nice compile time safety through your entire stack.

If you're writing C# then Typescript feels more natural, especially in Visual Studio it removes much of the painful context switching between a typed intellisense driven development and a javascript free for all.

duncanawoods• 12 years ago

I liked the idea of typescript but after frustration from fundamental issues I was very happy to bin it.

i) Wrapper libraries - Sure you can download them from definitelytyped but in practice I quickly found all sort of incompatibilities and things not working when used on real versions of the wrapped libraries. I had to edit them based on suggestions from forums. They are unversioned community efforts - poor versioning and no package manager is just a nightmare given the dozens of libraries we have to use for modern JS.

ii) Tooling - I thought this was the benefit and tried using it from WebStorm which claimed Typescript support. I found no meaningful intellisense only that it shelled out to the TS compiler in the background with some flakey syntax highlighting. The worst issue was that the compiler could regularly produce totally opaque error messages that were poorly located to the code issue and probably in the wrapper somewhere.

iii) Arbitrary apis - this is what I thought I wouldn't face but it was. Just a single line of code trying to the most basic task of creating an express server took hours of googling for the magic incantation. Most advice referred to the wrong version. It appears there are javascript patterns that typescript wrappers struggle to represent so the authors have to invent new ways of offering an interface. Wrappers don't come with documentation... even if they did, you now have to read both the original and the wrapper documentation. Not cool.

I hope some of this is now fixed but to have unreliable wrappers, no versioning and bad error messages means I am not hurrying back anytime soon.

shadowmint2• 12 years ago

I use pycharm with typescript, and either I have a new version or the pycharm plugin is far different to the webstorm one. All the refactoring options, jump-to-symbol, type hinting, type completion and inline-error checking work really well for me.

There are some pain points to be sure (modules, generics that don't quite work), but:

- Emits known good javascript patterns, preventing javascript's typical '50 ways of doing something'.

- Interacts cleanly and nicely with the existing javascript ecosystem.

- The emitted javascript runs on old browsers, and is only marginally bigger than the source code, smaller sometimes, if you use interfaces

- Clean module system (a little irritating to use perhaps, but still) supporting AMD and CommonJS (this is absolutely the future for JS dependencies).

- Open source, installable compiler using npm.

What's the alternative?

    - native JS      <-- Not a bad choice, needs discipline to maintain code quality
    - coffee script  <-- Interacts poorly with existing js ecosystem
    - dart           <-- Doesn't run on old browsers, poor interop
    - emscripten     <-- Massive output, poor interop

I cant say I'm any hurry to add C# into the mix, but typescript has impressed me thus far, despite being from Microsoft.

sfjailbird• 12 years ago

GWT has been doing this for Java for years and works very well. In fact I'd jump ship to any technology that can do what GWT does, i.e. a solid server-side language that you can also write the client in, with a large mature ecosystem. Keeping an eye on Dart.

um304• 12 years ago

I would really like to know other folks opinions on this point mentioned by the author: "The web will persist and the web will win."

bsaul• 12 years ago

There was a very recent post here on HN about the way chrome guys wanted to add support for shadow dom features so fast that people in the w3c asked them to at least write some specification first. That post made me think that the web isn't going to win over native for mobile before at least two years, if not more. The specification process is both compulsory for the web to simply "work", but it's also very cumbersome.

Another aspect is that mobile / tablette apps are moving from a "mostly read" to a "read/edit" usage, thanks to the exponential power gains inmobile CPU. That means what the web will have to compete against on mobile isn't facebook stream but rather full blown photoshop.

rimantas2• 12 years ago

The web will persist. But it won't win anything. Nor will native apps win anything. With time we will finally accept "the right tool for the job" stance and stop forcing round pegs into square holes.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

It's not necessarily a conflict that has an end. Because web-based stuff is standards-based, you'll always have a lag between state of the art and what is available in a standard. IMO, that's a good thing -- it pressures the market to continue innovating.

People at Netscape were talking about the web displacing native applications twenty years ago. That hasn't happened yet!

_random_3• 12 years ago

Well, there will always be at least two native apps - the browser and the server.

izolate2• 12 years ago

I want it to win, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to gauge the accuracy of such a claim. To me, it seems the largest of native mobile apps on any platform have a web component of some sort.

I'm in favor of application logic living on the web, with native apps used on the frontend for consumption.

spamizbad• 12 years ago

Ultimately these things are a matter of opinion, but as a developer who knows C#, I'm not sure I'd bother to learn it again if I had to completely reboot my knowledge. I can understand the perspective of being pragmatic with regards to the job market, but while there are an abundance of C# jobs available, offers tend to be lower unless you're specialized in Sharepoint or very senior. Culture can be a challenge in those shops as well.

"Professionally" I've worked the most with Python, JavaScript, PHP, and C#. Of those, I'd only keep JS and Python. I'd swap out C# and PHP for Clojure and C in a heartbeat. Probably not the best for job prospects but definitely the most fun.

UK-AL• 12 years ago

In the valley, python & ruby will probably have higher salaries.

Outside probably Java and C#.

72deluxe3• 12 years ago

That's probably different in the Welsh valleys.

skrebbel2• 12 years ago

Folks, the big point of this article is not that Hanselman likes C#, it's that his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java. It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there.

At some point, app stores had "discoverability" as an advantage over the web. This has been one of the strongholds of native app proponents. These days however, with the enormous amount of apps available on popular platforms, this discoverability feature has become a joke. It's akin to searching the 1999 web for interesting sites but you can only use a badly managed, bribe driven version of Yahoo.

Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search. You only need 1 major mobile OS to change paradigm and hide the difference between apps and web apps, and your mom won't care anymore. Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict.

juu4• 12 years ago

his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java

He mentions Java, twice. There is nothing wrong with making web-apps in Java, and there are some nice web frameworks to help doing that.

skrebbel2• 12 years ago

Hmyeah, you're right, he does. But I doubt he would've included Vala if Android apps were typically programmed in it.

collyw4• 12 years ago

Depending on the type of web app you are making, there are generally better (more productive) tools for the job than Java.

gonehome4• 12 years ago

I don't think it's just discoverability though.

I think the main question is if mobile web applications will be able to match native on both quality and performance.

Facebook attempted this and failed badly, but that doesn't mean it can't happen or that native will always have an edge. If native does continue to have an edge though then I think web has an uphill battle.

Joeri• 12 years ago

You can remove the word mobile. Web apps are still heavily inferior to native desktop apps. The answer to 'why mobile web apps?' is the same answer as to 'why desktop web apps?'

bad_user4• 12 years ago

On Facebook, I remember a time when the native app was horrible on Android.

In many ways it still is - it requires too many permissions and the list is growing. Recently they're asking for access to my SMS messages and in Android 4.3 I had a bug with my Nexus 4 in regards to location services as the Wifi-network provider was draining my battery and so I had to disable it, so Facebook's app was still requiring it, activating the GPS on each opening of the app and there was no way to turn that off, unless I turned the GPS off globally. Granted this is also a failure of Android's permissions system, but ...

The mobile web interface was and is still there. It doesn't matter if the mobile platform is new or old, it doesn't matter if Facebook's app was developed (and approved) for that platform, the web interface is there and it works, the only requirement being for the user to have a decent JS-enabled browser.

People view Facebook's investment in their mobile web interface as a failure. I view it as competitive advantage.

marknutter2• 12 years ago

Facebook was just a bit too early when trying to make html5 work on smart phones. If they were to make the attempt again today it would probably successful.

rimantas2• 12 years ago

  > hide the difference between apps and web apps

Frankly, this is only possible by web apps not being web apps. Do you have any experience working with eiterh native SDK? Because I cannot imagine any one having experience (not just cursory hello-world glance) thinking that web apps are somehow superrior. I also don't get how web apps are better (or will be better) discoveralbility-wise. Or why it matters.

grey-area4• 12 years ago

Frankly, this is only possible by web apps not being web apps.

I'm not sure I agree with that, though it might never happen because the owners of the major platforms have absolutely no interest in being turned into a dumb foundation by the web (or a badly debugged set of device drivers, as Andreesen put it in 1995). The reasons for the ascendance of mobile are political and corporate though, not technical. There's little reason webkit performance cannot approach that of native, particularly if it used something like nacl rather than js, and no reason APIs cannot be exposed to web apps too (Apple exposes quite a few).

Web apps are currently superior in: deployment,future-proofing, IMO discoverability, platform independence, and most importantly cost

Native apps are currently superior in: performance, accessible APIs, 3D

Their relative strengths will change over time, but note that performance is not usually an insurmountable obstacle, while some of those areas where the web has strengths are inimical to the way Google, Apple, MS or Amazon want to do business - for corporations to tie in their customer as tightly as possible to their ecosystem and tightly control what is available to them (as Apple have for example banned kindle selling on their platform) is the best possible outcome. App stores are broken by design, just as the MS desktop monopoly was, and I don't think they will be able to surmount those problems, because they are fundamentally user-hostile. Why can't I buy kindle books on my ipad? Because Apple wants to make money from that transaction.

The web has other problems, among them a worse is better approach in many areas, but I think it's ultimately going to prevail over other solutions bound to a specific hardware/software stack.

d02• 12 years ago

Actually I invented some technology that does this that we're using in production. Full two way integration between browsers and desktop and mobile apps. No plugins required as well.

And it wasn't a hard problem to solve.

binocarlos• 12 years ago

It is also performance - I think Facebook scared a lot of people into hiring Java + ObjC programmers when they announced 'HTML5 is too slow'.

Web applications had this problem circa 1998 - i.e. a perception of slowness - look at SalesForce now!

forgottenpaswrd• 12 years ago

"It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there."

"Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search."

You remember me to Kodak's "people will return to make analog photos, people want to hold something in their hand".

You are deluding yourself, and you can't see what you have in front of your eyes.

No, there is not a single platform that works in everything. In my company we do both low level programming(c, c++[small controlled subset so we control it]. embedded, microcontrollers, hardware) , and high level programming (python, java, web programing in general) for scripts, testing , rapid prototyping or deployment...

Both of them work very well for what they are designed for.

If we paint something in the screen in c we could do it in 0.001 seconds(without hardware accel!!), in python it is 0.5 seconds, 500 slower!!. In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript. Most people fake and call webgl with hard pre calculations done in a server(native) "web programming". It is not.

And we use python a lot. Because we don't care if something takes 5 seconds to draw if this saves hours or days of debugging.

In the future communications will be better, and program interaction will be stronger, but that does not mean that all software will be web. Multiplattform native works also very well, and much better for some things.

"Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict."

Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so.

The interest of a web company are something, and the interest of consumers are something else.

Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA.

You probably are American but there is people living in other countries, with different interests. As Snowden said the NSA uses their tools for industrial espionage(as should be expected).

If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.

bad_user4• 12 years ago

"In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript."

That's more like 1.5x:

http://asmjs.org/

http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/gap-between-asm-js-and-nat...

"Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so."

Google hasn't tried deep integration of web apps with Android. Their competing Chrome OS does and Chromebooks are a bestseller in 2013. Mobile Chrome doesn't have "apps" or plugins, like Firefox does, which is kind of disappointing. "Add to Homescreen" of favorite links was added in version 31 and current stable version is 32, so that's one version ago.

The reasons for this state of affairs can only be guessed, but given that you probably don't work for Google and you don't claim to have insider knowledge, I guess that quoted phrase is just pure speculation - and a much more sensible guess would be that delivering a native SDK that works well was faster than trying to push for new web standards (since Android was competing with iOS and second to market) ... something which they are doing with Chrome OS and Mozilla is doing with Firefox OS and it's a very different reason than your claim.

And if I am to make a prediction, I bet that in the future either we'll see Android and Chrome OS merging, or we'll see Chrome OS mobile devices, in addition to Android.

"Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA."

Web interfaces and offline access are not mutually exclusive. Chrome's offline GMail is pretty good these days. For PGP encryption in GMail's interface, I've been using: http://www.mailvelope.com/

Surely Chrome's permissions for extensions could be improved for better security, because as we've seen, perfectly legitimate extensions can turn over night to mallware/spyware/adware. And we would need new web standards for extensions and probably for doing client-side encryption, however these are not insurmountable problems. Either way, if you're using GMail, your unencrypted emails will get stored on their servers, whether you're using GMail's web interface or not.

If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.

I don't like the insult inherent in this message. I'm using web GMail and I'm not an US citizen. The problem is that Google is an US company, not that GMail is a web interface.

And in regards to clients and native apps - my trust for binary blobs is equal to my trust for web interfaces, which is zero. Basically I don't trust anything that's not open-source and developed in the open - as in, are you sure your operating system doesn't have backdoors planted? ... just saying, seeing that you're playing the trust card.

fidotron• 12 years ago

I have to agree with this. It seems to me that people that think the web will win haven't tried deploying the same functionality via web and native app - the native app will be faster to develop and better.

Even Google seem to know this in their hearts. The Chrome team recently have started to acknowledge how far behind as a platform the web really is, and things like Google Now don't exist as websites at all.

The web simply has too many cases which don't work. For example, my current headache is the lack of wake lock style functionality, but the layout system is a trainwreck, the language tooling is abominable, and support for stuff like audio is a mess. All it has is ubiquity.

grayrest2• 12 years ago

It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there.

For anybody doubting this, please read Clay Shirky's "Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data". [1]

[1] http://shirky.com/writings/permanet.html

It's a fun read in a post-iphone world but the money quote is:

The permanet strategy is to start with a service that is good but expensive, and to make it cheaper. The nearlynet strategy is to start with a service that is lousy but cheap, and to make it better. The permanet strategy assumes that quality is the key driver of a new service, and permanet has the advantage of being good at every iteration. Nearlynet assumes that cheapness is the essential characteristic, and that users will forgo quality for a sufficient break in price.

What the permanet people have going for them is that good vs. lousy is not a hard choice to make, and if things stayed that way, permanet would win every time. What they have going against them, however, is incentive. The operator of a cheap but lousy service has more incentive to improve quality than the operator of a good but expensive service does to cut prices. And incremental improvements to quality can produce disproportionate returns on investment when a cheap but lousy service becomes cheap but adequate. The good enough is the enemy of the good, giving an edge over time to systems that produce partial results when partially implemented.

The people on the web platform have much greater motivation to improve perf and the developer experience than the people working on native platforms have to expand distribution.

Fasebook• 12 years ago

and hide the difference between apps and web apps, and your mom won't care anymore

Completely wrong, imho. There's no benefit to obscuring information about what the user is doing. This also implies a universal cloud storage where authors of software have more access to user's personal information than the user.

You're basically yearning for what Google's Chrome crap is trying to do, so you're not going to do it better.

Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict.

I think I see where you're coming from here. If you just want to suckle at the tit at what ever company is #1, then sure, learning their stack and developing whatever for it is a sure way to make steady income. Shit, how about a steady job while you're at it. Then it really doesn't matter what widgets you're pumping out. Wait, is this an entrepreneurship forum? Anyway, trying to play Google's game or Apple's game is just a good way to be their bitch. I'm sure you're aware of why "discoverablity" has been removed from appstores. This is a culture war, at some fronts.

If you want to build a digital prison for your mom, go right ahead, but don't expect your kids to embrace this "cloud" stuff in any way that you're dreaming of. You're just building outdated virtual landfill techgarbage the moment you touch any of these paradigms you're talking about.

Silhouette7• 12 years ago

It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there.

I agree, but not for the technical reasons most people are mentioning so far.

I think there is a much simpler driving force: mobile app stores have set both the quality bar and pricing expectations so low that it's almost impossible to develop good, non-trivial software for them and make money.

On top of that, the app store platforms tend to want a big cut and/or restrict the use of other payment models and/or want developers to jump through hoops just so users can install their application and/or require developers to build in a specific programming language that produces executables for their specific platform and/or a bunch of other obstacles that web development simply doesn't have.

Meanwhile, the only major benefit native apps have to offer in return these days is access to a few native features. Given how much success many web applications have already enjoyed, it's clear that those features aren't compelling in many of the application domains where this kind of decision is being made. It's also clear that if performance was ever really an issue for most web apps, it's an ever diminishing one and mostly irrelevant by now.

The two major business models that have made serious money from mobile apps other than in outlier cases are in-app payments and advertising, which are probably the two most widely abused and consumer-hostile payment models in widespread use today. I suspect mobile apps in their current form were already dead as a serious software platform as soon as people were selling $1 gimmick applications and $5 puzzle games in app stores. The industry just hasn't quite realised yet because there's still too much hype from the (mostly now over) gold rush, but fortunately we have high quality and great value apps like Dungeon Keeper at the top of the promotions screens to show us just how good mobile apps can be if you want to make real money from them.

Meanwhile, as numerous HN regulars can attest, plenty of B2B web apps are making money like it grows on trees, and plenty more people are making a decent amount of money with other B2C business models that simply aren't compatible with today's mobile app world but work fine on the web.

almata• 12 years ago

"Ultimately, we're all amateurs." - Wow, that's something I've been thinking a lot lastly. It's true that a good developer can learn a new language (or technology, or even paradigm) in a quite short amount of time, but at the same time, when we're constantly doing that it's true that, as an effect and as the author says, we're becoming permanent amateurs. I don't have a solution for this though (maybe there is no solution at all, or maybe there is not even supposed to be a solution).

pistle• 12 years ago

The best we can be are professional on-the-job learners with a knack for clean implementations.

acomjean• 12 years ago

Its true. To quote a wise man at the php conference "I get the feeling we're just making stuff up that works" when talking about scaling sites.

Its about being a professional in the way you handle the tools at your disposal.

This has been going on for a while. It was noted last century that a job opening asking for "5+ years experience" in a technology that was 3 years old.

iamyatin• 12 years ago

my language would be python.. it's everywhere.. be it android, raspberry pi, scientific computations, and what not.

alkonaut4• 12 years ago

I'd learn F# + C + Rust + TypeScript/ES6. Anything that lets me avoid learning C++ or JS.

camus25• 12 years ago

You cant learn Typescript without learning how Javascript works.

Typescript doesnt fix javascript issues, it just extends it. It means you'll get some nasty bugs in your code if you think you can just ignore javascript.

alkonaut4• 12 years ago

I know you need to at least have rudimentary knowledge about js in order to use typescript effectively. But I think I already do (I just don't want to learn more as it makes my skin itch). More likely I'll just give up on the entire thing and wait until ES6...

nly2• 12 years ago

Once you know C, you've already gone through most of the pain with regard to C++s warts, but you still have to treat it as a new language.

I really don't know why people have such a problem getting to grips with pure-C++ functionality like templates, virtual functions, inheritance, RAII, exceptions, references, type system oddities, rvalues and lvalues and their references, operator overloads, extended temporary lifetimes, smart pointers, runtime type information, the lack of decent unicode support, slow compilation times, binary compatibility which is tricky to maintain, member function pointers, virtual base class construction order, SFINAE, and static polymorphism and concept checking.

It's really not that difficult... ;)

sixbrx• 12 years ago

You had me until "type system oddities" which was a spoiler :)

alkonaut4• 12 years ago

I don't mind the C++ that is "C with objects". What bothers me is the broken template metaprogramming, endlessly varying kinds of special pointers, massive libraries that does the same things slightly differently and so on.

lmm2• 12 years ago

I think you're coming from a specialized area if C++ even seems like an option. And C + Rust seems like lot of overlap.

alkonaut4• 12 years ago

Option for what?

Yes C and Rust (and C++) overlap a lot. C is inevitable for a lot of embedded and low level stuff, but for large scale systems dev I hope to see Rust replace C++.

drdiablo• 12 years ago

My opinion on "the web will persist and the web will win" is that it's not a won battle. Native apps have always been smoother, giving users a better experience overall. On the contrary, mobile web apps have been bad, and haven't much evolved since we started having mobile devices (laptops don't count :p). I'm pretty sure that the future resides in mobile devices, and they can't rub the web, we'll have to use the alternative: native. At that point nothing stops Apple or facebook to go entirely native and therefore abandoning the web ideology (and the physical web). So I think that the web is a possible future, but nothing is settled yet, we need more groundbreaking ideas from the web to make it a desirable choice of future.

_random_3• 12 years ago

I think there are too many smart and capable developers in the world to settle on old poorly-upgradable languages for everything. So hopefully there will always be a choice.

Thiz3• 12 years ago

Cordova is the future and the future belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Learn Cordova.

colinramsay• 12 years ago

You could "learn cordova" but you'd have a massive gap in your skills. As the website says "Apache Cordova is a platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript", i.e. you still need to lean HTML, CSS, Javascript and a backend technology.

izolate2• 12 years ago

What makes you so sure Cordova is the future? Curious.

Thiz3• 12 years ago

Code once, run everywhere.

Discoverable, searchable, updatable, all the good qualities of a web app with the power and speed of a native app.

Of course you need HTML, JS, CSS and the whole web stack, but the good thing is everybody already knows it. Standards are good.

Apache is behind it, also Google, Firefox, Ubuntu, everybody benefits from a standard way of developing apps once, but very specially users, and coders.

It has to be the future, it will be no matter what, no barriers will be high enough that a great idea can not overcome.

Cordova is that idea.

herghost• 12 years ago

I think Virtualisation, Automation, and Orchestration technologies would be the best place to start again. I've seen some really impressive things done at pretty impressive scale with this stuff.

mrmondo• 12 years ago

Python - I believe it's the language of the now and the near future.

camus25• 12 years ago

Python is multipurpose and has great libs, but personaly I dont like the language itself. I think Ruby is a better designed language , but Ruby has problems too. Unfortunatly the perfect language + ecosystem doesnt exist.

collyw4• 12 years ago

I think you would like Perl :)

pouzy3• 12 years ago

Most studies are showing it. Mobile will make a big difference in the near future though, so the balance might change quite fast.

ilaksh3• 12 years ago

My favorite things right now which I am happy to recommend are ToffeeScript https://github.com/jiangmiao/toffee-script with Node.js and Nimrod http://nimrod-lang.org/. I also think LiveScript is awesome.

AngularJS is great. Web Components are better I think though.

Docker has redefined devops in my opinion http://docker.io

GLSL is very cool and something you can even experiment with in your browser using Three.js etc. I believe that real time ray tracing is going to be a thing within a few years http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abqAanC2NZs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5Y06xkRWio

CoreOS looks very interesting.

WebRTC is a technology that could almost make an industry irrelevant. http://simplewebrtc.com/

Understanding APIs around bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general seems important.

I believe that the internet is eventually going to be switching away from normal named server structures to a content-oriented architecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking There are a lot of ways this category of architecture is actually currently being deployed behind the scenes, for example CDNs or bittorrent. I believe that we are going to start using that type of system more and more and eventually we will lose things like the HTTP layer. This may be combined with some of the technologies related to cryptocurrency.

For an example of why we are moving to named data networking, take a look at well.. just about any web application that wants to scale. For example the npm registry. Also consider the issues around privacy with Facebook and the NSA, and the ability for governments to censor or take down web sites or domains.

So any technologies that facilitate things like that, such as more traditional clustered SQL or NoSQL tools, or especially protocols and systems specifically designed for named data networking, will be very powerful. I like the idea of heterogeneous peer nodes that have everything they need built in and can connect to the network on their own.

Another area that is really going to be key is artificial general intelligence. Notice I did not say machine learning. I think look at taking advantage of built deep learning systems like the one IBM has with Watson. Or look for deep learning, autoencoders, hierarchical hidden markov models, hierarchical temporal memory. But most practically for the next few years IBM and Google's (when Google releases it) cloud AIs are going to be game changing for many industries and harnessing them in software will be very useful.

Qualcomm/Brain Corporation and some others also have some neuromorphic chip technologies that could be extremely useful.

Any system that really takes advantage of next gen VR devices like Oculus Rift is going to be interesting.

idProQuo• 12 years ago

I've never heard anybody mention Angular and Web Components as solving the same problem. I'm pretty fuzzy on front end MVC stuff in general, but I know almost nothing about Web Components. Do you know of any good tutorials or resources?

ilaksh3• 12 years ago

http://customelements.io/ http://www.polymer-project.org/ http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/polymer/databinding.html https://github.com/webcomponents/element-boilerplate

For comparison to Angular, see http://angularjs.org/ Create components section or http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive .

Reusable components along with two-way data binding are the most important features of Angular. Web Components does components in a more product neutral, standardized way with a nicer API. Creating custom directives for elements in AngularJS is a pain.

marknutter2• 12 years ago

Angular will utilize web components when they become a standard. Think of directives in Angular as a polyfill for web components.

rip7472• 12 years ago

I've been doing ColdFusion for well over 13 years now. The reason I choose it was because at the time the only other web technology that looked promising was ASP and I _hate_ Visual Basic with a passion. Today I'm focusing all my attention on C# and Ruby.

That all said, if I had to start over today... I wouldn't be programming, I go back to networking. As much as I love programming, it just doesn't amaze me anymore. I guess its the lack of physical interaction. I'm starting to dread typing on a keyboard for a living.

I look at all my friends in networking and see all the cool toys they get to play with and want to jump in the sandbox.

CmonDev3• 12 years ago

Pick a job that will not get automated in 10 years.

rip7472• 12 years ago

care to elaborate on what exactly you mean by "automated". I fail to see how installing physical hardware can be automated.

bitwize• 12 years ago

.NET and JAva because that's where the money still is.

taude• 12 years ago

1) Any high-level language that runs in the Java VM. Because 1) there's tons of open source libraries 2) syntactic sugar for devs 3) operational stability of the VM 4) flexibility of running it on both open source and closed source OSes meeting a variety of business requirements.

2) A scripting language for gluing your operations together, for quick and dirty services, prototyping, etc...: Python

3) JavaScript.

camus25• 12 years ago

Is there a C# on the JVM ? it would be awesome.

viraptor2• 12 years ago

There's jvm for .net: http://www.ikvm.net/ and .net (clr) for jvm: http://xmlvm.org/clr2jvm/

lmm2• 12 years ago

Not as such, no. Java (particularly post-8), Kotlin, Groovy, Ceylon and Scala cover various pieces of the territory that C# holds in .net-land.

CmonDev3• 12 years ago

Or you could just pick a language with the best IDE support. Which leaves us with Java and C#.

piratebroadcast• 12 years ago

Im currently learning Rails and Javascript- Good to know I seem to have made a safe choice.

LeicaLatte• 12 years ago

Apple has been around for 30+ years, are a 100 billion dollar company now and are here to stay. Definitely objective-c.

Javascript because every device made today or tomorrow will ship with a decent javascript runtime.

Then move on to the things you personally like.

weavie• 12 years ago

I would have thought that learning two languages at the same time.. especially with one of them being javascript would be a bit of a brain overload.

I would just suggest sticking to javascript to start with. You can do front end, node and mobile. With that under your belt you would then be in a much better place to jump to a different server language and would know more about which one would be the best fit for you. But focus on one thing at a time, you'll learn much quicker that way.

nly2• 12 years ago

C++14

TuringTest• 12 years ago

The Functional Reactive Programming paradigm is going to hit hard. It makes parallel programming extremely easy, which is a huge bonus for multithreading (a great way to harness multiprocessors) and for loading web pages asynchronously.

Libraries for this programming style are being created for almost any popular platform, and knowledge is spreading quickly. I recommend following some tutorial or online course on the subject.

geogra4• 12 years ago

SAP. It's not particularly exotic but it runs the world.

mbesto2• 12 years ago

You mean ABAP ;) Actually SAP is at a very interesting crossroad right now. You don't have to know ABAP anymore. If you can leverage SAP Gateway and check out OpenUI5 - http://sap.github.io/openui5/ you can make a name for yourself. There is heavy demand for this area right now and not enough supply.

EDIT- If anyone is interested in this area, let me know!

greendata• 12 years ago

I'm a current python/ruby/javascript contractor interested in getting into SAS/ABAP consulting and development. Do you have any recommendations where to start?

Thiz3• 12 years ago

I've wondered all these years why nobody has built a SAP open source clone and make money, tons of it, in consultancy.

Ripe for disruption. Billions over billions.

this_user• 12 years ago

"Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author."

A Microsoft employee talking up C#, what a surprise.

d02• 12 years ago

To be fair, he does kick them down regularly on a lot of stuff. C# is one of the better bits of the Microsoft ecosystem.

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

If you're in the US, learn whatever the hell you want. Then move to a biggish city and find a job using it. Bam, you are now equipped to take advantage of the biggest tech boom the country has seen since the 1800s. The 90s wishes they were this good.

crazygringo• 12 years ago

If you're looking to maximize your choice of companies to work at, one piece of advice could be to focus on front-end instead of back-end.

I'm equally proficient at front-end and back-end, but the last time I did a whole bunch of interviews, I advertised myself as a front-end programmer (since there aren't too many full-stack positions around).

Why? As a back-end developer, you're limited to picking companies that match a single one of the three broad back-end categories -- generally Java, Microsoft, or "open-source" (PHP/Ruby/Node/etc.) -- since any programmer is usually only going to be really proficient in just one of those. If we assume companies are split 3-way, you're instantly limiting yourself to 1/3 of possible companies.

But on the front-end, there's no balkanization. It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. It's not too hard to learn JavaScript and jQuery inside and out, and with some solid CSS experience, knowledge of good development patterns, and maybe a framework or two, you can interview practically anywhere.

bjornsteffanson• 12 years ago

Your assessment of the emerging front-end skillset is spot on. For better or for worse, if js frameworks are here to stay for the next few years (and it seems they are), the programmers who got in early are going to clean up as they are now sitting on 1-3 years of experience.

lstamour2• 12 years ago

Ah but then you get http://www.100percentjs.com/just-like-grunt-gulp-browserify-... (and HN discussion) ... of course, despite this, I'm in your camp. Even as I'm doing mobile and now learning modern/ISO C++ for cross-platform development, the strengths that originally got me hired were in web programming and you can always pick up enough to work with views in one of the big technologies, be it Wordpress/Drupal (sigh), Rails (half sigh) or more abstracted GWT/ASP.NET components. (meh)

That said, I'm not sure where the bar is, even in web. Writing Chrome extensions and apps? Javascript injection on mobile? Dart? Web Components? Ember? (ouch) Angular, or React.js? Or a certain company's stack like Closure? And don't forget security vulnerabilities and keeping up with OWASP checklists or UX improvements, prototyping in HTML. And then there's performance considerations, eg. what Ilya Grigorik writes about these days. And touch screens, mobile, responsive... Front-end has a lot of transferrable skills, but it's a complex beast too, often full of legacy code.

davidjnelson3• 12 years ago

Angular. Seriously.

OhHeyItsE• 12 years ago

It's not too hard to learn JavaScript and jQuery inside and out

which is why the talent pool is larger and salaries lower.

mrich• 12 years ago

The same holds for C/C++. You can find a wide variety of companies that use it in one form or another. Plus, it's a front-end technology too :) And it is kind of a superset of Java or C#, so you are a good fit for very many jobs.

macspoofing2• 12 years ago

It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript.

No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things like require.js to manage imports. Or, instead of raw JS, you go with TypedScript, or Dart, or CoffeeScript, or whatever, and then put a framework on top of those. You're still not done, because that gets you the JS part, usually you complement it with a CSS framework (like bootstrap) and a SASS framework. In the end, you have a hodgepodge of frameworks of libraries, that plug JS holes, and functionally look and feel different.

So no, it's not simply JavaScript everywhere.

greyshi• 12 years ago

So... javascript, javascript frameworks, and javascript variants. I think "Javascript, Javascript, Javascript" was accurate enough. And Bootstrap is easy.

DanHulton2• 12 years ago

It's javascript, angular, and jQuery.

Seriously, jQuery > all the other "low-level" libraries out there combined, and Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over.

If you want to interview practically anywhere, learn those three and you're solid.

Silhouette7• 12 years ago

Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries.

Since when? It's perfectly possible to build web sites/apps, even large scale ones, using no framework at all. Pick a handy utility library, whether it's jQuery or Underscore/Lodash or whatever, and get coding.

I don't know where this idea that you somehow have to build web apps using some humungous framework came from, but I hope it relocates that rock and crawls back under it. In the history of programming, very few frameworks (as opposed to libraries) have stood the test of time.

shawndumas3• 12 years ago

I am stuck in a hiring war-room for the last 2 weeks (two to go). [1]

We are using jQuery/EmberJS/Bootstrap/Grunt. Everyone of the FEs agreed that experience in any JS MVC was acceptable. [2]

So while I agree that it's not JS, JS, JS but it's not quite as bad as what you're saying.

--------

[1]: We were having a problem getting front-end people so they had managers put 15 front-end engineers on the task full time for a month. Our mandate is 30 engineers in 30 days.

[2]: sdumas [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com if your looking!

leishulang2• 12 years ago

most boss think front-end programmer as code monkeys, and back-end guys as architects. Good luck.

sehr• 12 years ago

You're either working for the wrong boss, or the wrong company then.

moron4hire• 12 years ago

To start over again, I'd have had a much bigger focus on standards and open-source, standards-compliant software. Having been spoiled by Visual Studio, I now lack the patience necessary to setup a dev environment from scratch with Emacs or Vi or whatever.

And no, Eclipse is not an alternative, though maybe NetBeans is, which are two statements I really wouldn't have said 10 years ago. I don't really feel like it's a case of Visual Studio having gotten significantly better. NetBeans has gotten significantly better and Eclipse has gotten significantly worse. MonoDevelop and Xamarin Studio are waaaaay too buggy to be useful. I find myself gravitating to a text editor like Geany or really anything that combines syntax highlighting, tabbed documents, and a file explorer. It's amazing how infrequently those three things come together (I'm looking at you, Notepad++ and Notepad2), or just don't work very well (Hi there, LightTable and DrRacket).

While I like C#, the promise of quality cross-platform software with it is mostly a boondoggle. The hoops you have to jump through, and the state of the dev tools for Mono, just push me towards Java anytime I need a cross-platform desktop GUI app.

And that's sad. Because it's not like Java does a particularly good job of it, it just does a site-better job of it than most anything else. I don't have a good enough handle on the C toolchain to pick up and run with Qt or GTK and cross compile for every platform. And nobody pays enough attention to desktop in basically any other language.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'd really, really like to be wrong here. I suppose I could do [Pythong|Ruby|OCaml|Haskell|Racket]+[GTK|Qt], but it feels grating. It doesn't match. As far as I can tell, there is no GUI library that works well in functional languages--even a wrapper on top of an OO one. But again, correct me if I'm wrong. Please.

Other than that, I wish I had ditched SQL Server a long time ago. Postgres is just as easy to install and use now, and has been for several years. I wish I had the balls to replace my clients servers with Postgres and just not tell them about it. They probably wouldn't notice.

I wish I had never wasted time on Python.

I wish I had kept gaming to my Playstation and stuck it through with Linux back in 2000.

I wish I had not gone to college. Going to college meant I had to get a job that paid well to service my debt afterwards. And for where I lived, that meant I had to buy a car. Even still, being 22 years old and having only $35k in debt was far better off than most of my peers, and even better still than most of the kids graduating today, so I guess I'm not too badly off. But still, I think about the last 10 years and really wish I had been writing all of that software for myself rather than The Man.

What the hell was the point of writing all those projects in college for the command line? 4 years of wasted practice on an interface only other programmers care about. It is such a fundamentally different paradigm, and most of my peers didn't transition well. I didn't transition well, and I've been either the most successful person or at least in the top 3 of my graduating class.

I wish I had never stopped doing screwy shit in JavaScript. There was stuff I wrote in 1997 that people are pushing today as "the power of HTML 5!" If I stuck with it, instead of listening to my "betters" at work or in college, then I think I could have contributed a lot more.

So, less about what specifically I would have studied, and more about not listening to what others have to say about what I should have been doing.

FigBug• 12 years ago

If I could do it all again, I'd study a lot more math in University and probably end up focusing on something like Audio DSP. I think it's a pretty safe career choice since it's hard self learn compared to a lot of other fields, meaning competition is less. And if you are good, companies will happily pay you to learn tech of the week.

dankoss• 12 years ago

Less competition, but also less demand and less career options.

Source: This is what I do.

stiff• 12 years ago

This idea that a software engineer picks a language as his "favourite" and becomes a "Ruby developer" or a "JavaScript developer" ever since is completely misguided, and I'm sad to see it cherished further in this article.

Languages are tools, and tools should be picked depending on the project: its application domain, performance requirements, availability of libraries for important subproblems that have been identified, target platform, etc., there are lots of very concrete factors to look into. Completely ignoring those factors in favour of choosing your "favourite" or one of just 2 languages you happen to like, is going to have suboptimal results. A good engineer knows a lot about programming languages in general (what is taught in a university "Programming languages" course), has basic experience with a huge number of languages, and picks the programming language for the project based on this knowledge, based on research and on prototyping, that's how I see it.

I recommend looking back at Marvin Minsky's 1970 Turing Award lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science". Little has changed since:

The trouble with computer science today is an obsessive concern with form instead of content.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/Turing...

xiaoma• 12 years ago

Languages and frameworks are tools, but they're tools that require significant time investment to master and there are too many of them to master every one. There are many, many cases in which a given person's "optimal" language to use for the task is different than the "optimal" language would be if the user were somehow equally skilled in all.

Obviously, if the project is far outside the sweet spot of a given programmer's favorite language, it's worth it to learn a different one. The larger the project, the more often this is true. If for example, a Java specialist wanted to build a webapp, it would likely be worth it to invest the effort to learn how to do so with JavaScript instead of sticking to the familiar GWT. But for a smallish text manipulation task, it's just not worth it for an expert user of Ruby (a pretty good text manipulation language) to learn Perl (a language really designed for text manipulation).

The sweet spot, in my opinion is to work at getting very good at one language per major domain area and change focus only for large projects, for projects far from the sweet spot of any already known languages or for fun.

forgotAgain• 12 years ago

You have to start somewhere.

api• 12 years ago

"The trouble with computer science today is an obsessive concern with form instead of content."

Interestingly, literature has the same problem.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Becoming a "JavaScript developer" surely pigeonholes you, and that is not good, but early in your learning process it can be good to pick a bread-and-butter language to master first.

That way, you aren't spread thin as you learn everything for the first time, and when you learn new languages you can relate them back to your first language, of which you have a complete grasp.

Naturally in the long run you want to be totally language agnostic, but early on I think that's putting the cart before the horse a bit.

Also, you have guys like me, who code as an ancillary function to our actual job. For us, one or two workhorse languages are all we really need to invest our time in. Think of a physicist who knows Fortran, for example. He is a "Fortran guy", but that's ok. He's a physicist, not a developer.

nostrademons• 12 years ago

The other nice thing about picking a "bread-and-butter" language is that it qualifies you for opportunities where you can leverage it to learn other skills. It's so much easier to learn, say, machine-learning if you enter a company where there are machine-learning experts that you can observe at work and ask questions of, rather than just trying to read all the online course material. That requires having something to bring to the table, and if you're really good at frontend stuff you can get hired at places that do that and work on projects where people are doing really interesting backend stuff.

badman_ting• 12 years ago

If you want to point out that the way the world works is crazy - well, alright. But the rest of us have to make a living, and the way hiring works is that organizations hire in part based on your experience with a certain language or platform. "Well, they're doing it wrong". Okay, let's say I agree. Then what?

"Right tool for the job" is getting to be a very tiring orthodoxy. It seems to come around whenever people don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of comparing tools. I say stop the handwringing, pick something that feels right to you, and start doing stuff.

pjmlp3• 12 years ago

No it is standard way to work in the consulting world.

Every project I work on tends to have a complete different technology stack.

habosa• 12 years ago

If I could start over and pick one language, it would be Java. If I could pick two or three I'd add Python or Ruby but let's stick with one.

Everyone knows Java is great (or at least pretty good) for "building large systems" like the article said. You can learn a lot about software engineering from all of the practices that have built up in the Java community over the years. Note that I'm not talking about gross JavaEE stuff, but just good, solid OO programming with an incredible about of libraries for whatever you need.

The real reason I'd push for Java is Android. Android programming is an incredible way for a newcomer to get non-trivial code in front of a large audience in a production environment. Writing an Android app has a decently steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it you can really make progress quickly. Then you can publish to the Google Play Store with no app review, no $99 fee, and no Mac required. You'll get some downloads and real feedback on almost any app.

The first app I ever made was a total piece of shit and it got 50,000 downloads. It had a ton of bugs that people asked me to fix and it taught me how to make something that people actually want in an environment where I had nothing to lose. Even ended up making a few hundred dollars on ads which 18-year-old me thought was pretty damn cool.

There is an intoxicating feeling when you realize that a few hundred or few thousand people out there are running your code in their pocket, and it makes you want to create even more. It's the same with iPhone/ObjC I'm sure but I think Java has more other uses and Android is definitely a less intimidating platform for a beginner to just put something out there.

interstitial• 12 years ago

I'm sorry did you ask what technologies, or what over-arching philosophy of self-improvement vs. pragmatic career development we should debate?

stcredzero• 12 years ago

The sweet spot for Bang for the Buck, for a typical programmer, would be Go -- then use it in a functional style. (Except for in strictly delineated circumstances, the entire code base should have zero side-effects outside of the current function scope.)

This gives you a safe, easily concurrent language, plus most of the benefits of functional programming, but without as shallow a learning curve. (Meaning not as hard. Learning curve is not an analogy for a steep road! Height = stuff learned!) You also get very good debugging. (gdb and cgdb in particular)

I'm writing my current project in Clojure, however, because it has most of the advantages of the above, but the available GC technology for the platform is far superior. (You'll have to learn some new debugging tricks, however.)

pouzy3• 12 years ago

I like Python. It took me a while to get out of PHP, so I guess I'd drop PHP to jump directly in Python.

But most of all I'd learn how to fix a car. They are such a pain when they break.

pouzy3• 12 years ago

Ho, and most definitely mobile languages. That will all put us out of our job if we can't move into that field.

chaudruc• 12 years ago

Excel, Powerpoint, SQL

Business tools.

buzaga41• 12 years ago

Sports.

spitfire• 12 years ago

I'd learn computer science, again. Languages come and go, the core tools for thinking are solid foundations.

Then I'd learn Lisp, Python/Ruby and Mathematica.

room271• 12 years ago

I would learn (as someone who is interested in backend stuff - scalability, high-performance systems, apis) related to web-work:

- HTTP - C (because it teaches you how computers work a bit) - One of the new JVM languages (either Clojure or Scala, preferably the first) - some bash (for scripting)

Realistically that is a lot to learn in a year.

On top of that I'd start dabbling with Javascript but not expect to learn it this year (that's for next year).

If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

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