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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

I live in Berlin now and Ruby isn't very popular here. It's much more difficult to find Ruby/Rails developers than React developers. The tech industry here is growing but still in its infancy, there aren't a glut of devs who started working with Rails when it was a hot new thing that have an appreciation for it. Javascript and Python are very popular, Ruby not so much.

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A lot of my friends in SF tend to pick up a new language every year or two. Is this type comparatively rare in Berlin or are people just digging into a long list of other languages first?

From the jobs I see Javascript, Python, Java & iOS are pretty much the entire market so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to actually work with other langs and get paid for it.

Pretty much every language I've learned, I've learned on my own and only possibly later gotten paid for using.

For example, I picked up Elixir (which I currently make money using) by rewriting a Rails app into Phoenix four years ago. That app never made me any money, but it did provide a great motivation for learning Elixir!

Similarly, I'm learning Rust now. I'm going through books and videos, building toy projects and slowly picking it up. I've never been paid to write Rust, but that will likely change in the future.

Other languages, like Racket and 8088 assembly I've never been paid to write and likely never will but I don't regret exploring them a bit.

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