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Comment by hackerboos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Agreed, backend isn't going to disappear. I was thinking of learning go, but going for Elixir seems like it might be a better option - happy to have read this.

I don't think ruby/rails is going anywhere for a while though, it's too easy to get things up and running. And I think node is going to be around for a while too, and increased familiarity with javascript is pretty much guaranteed to be helpful, so going that direction isn't a bad idea either.

Your experiences are nearly identical to mine. I've also moved away from keeping with the latest JavaScript tools/frameworks and have really taken to Elixir. I still write a ton of Ruby but having Elixir in my tool set has been awesome. Elixir is great for the things Ruby isn't, namely SSE/WebSockets and background processing flows beyond just fire and forget.

The thing that did it for me was watching Benjamin Tan Wei Hao talk on speeding up background jobs, which was a problem for me at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1J1lVzRuQ

http://www.neo.com/2014/08/11/ruby-elixir-polyglottin-ftw

I have been learning Erlang because I like the practices it encourages, but Elixir seems like Erlang with more modern syntax and especially better string handling. I think I will give it a try.

How much work is there for Elixir though? Asking as one who doesn't know.

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