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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised nobody here has said JavaScript. It's not on your list, and personally I strongly dislike it, but it's the most ubiquitous language nowadays in the world. You will definitely be able to find side project work in it. And if you add in Node, you're golden for most any web project.

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I was going to come and also say JS. It is not my favorite language, but it is certainly not going anywhere anytime soon. There is also so much bad code being written in JS right now that entire careers will likely be built doing clean up.

> There is also so much bad code being written in JS right now that entire careers will likely be built doing clean up.

Perhaps the most demotivational advice I've ever read :-)

"Learn javascript and clean up other people's mess."

That very advice has powered many a career in Cobol...

But you're not meant to tell someone that when they're just starting out... :-)

Some people (myself at least) actually like refactoring. There is something really satisfying about coming in and fixing up a badly written Node.js codebase, breaking it up into microservices, etc.

Plus if you want to be a $200+ per hour contractor, this type of "mercenary work" can be really profitable.

When I decided to focus on a new technology I really wanted to be somewhere where all the "cool" things are happening. I ended up in the world of JavaScript and really have not looked back. If you are undecided have a look here http://githut.info/ as well as look at your local job market. I like to attend hackathons so being able to leverage a massive developer community is key to any technology I will bet my career on. Even now I'm pushing myself beyond JavasScript to use typescript as it brings a maturity to JavaScript I felt was lacking. The important thing is that I feel that there is so much community investment into being able to do things in JavaScript that it enables me to focus on deliverables.

I expected this answer at the top... JS will always be in demand for front end web positions (the MVC front end frameworks included), but as for the backend I have doubts about it's longevity, a major flag being the IO & Joyent split, as well as general back end developer anathema to using JavaScript I've sensed over the years (your's being an example). Maybe they'll resolve the community, and maybe greater numbers of back end devs will learn to enjoy JavaScript. It's hot right now of course, but thinking long term my experience tells me it's a risky choice if your goal is more pure back end dev.

I don't have an opinion on the long-term viability of JS on the backend (though I enjoy Node.js for "realtime" web serving), but it wasn't clear from your post if you were aware that IO.js and Node.js are getting back together.

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/06/16/node-js-and-io-js-are-se...

The io.js and node.js split is actually a sign of health in the core of Node.js. Tired of Joyent's stagnate stewardship, the top contributors forked it. They forced Joyent's hand into creating a foundation.

Now io.js and Node.js are "merging", but the merge is just the io.js codebase with some patches from node.js all under the node.js branding and the new node foundation (which has blessings from the linux foundation, IBM, Microsoft, etc). So the community has been "resolved."

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