| It looks like you have a good background on things. As a polyglot with experience in plenty of languages, I'd minimize the number of syntaxes to pick up. I would focus on leveraging your javascript background as a starting point. Let me tell you why. Not much has changed since the 90's in one area: there are as many opinions and interpretations running around as facts. There's no shortage of time being spent re-inventing the wheel over and over in frameworks that really don't look much different. The end result is most languages have pretty decent frameworks to work with. A better question is what would be a best path forward for you to dip your feet in and move forward? The web and mobile landscape is a lot nicer now with the tools that aim to help you get things done quicker, as long as you don't go off their beaten path. Which two swiss army knife tools could you use to roll out into one thing? The first big shift is to think mobile first, including mobile web based apps that also work on desktop. I've jumped into Javascript more so in the past year as node.js has continued to mature. I use my strategically limited time to build value and not spend my time learning like I had to in my 20's. The frameworks I'm playing with at the moment that provided a good coverage for web applications as well as doing mobile web app dev, as well as mobile app development. Sails.js (forked to trails.js now) will be familiar to you. This will cover writing web apps and not having to build your own entire stack. Has worked wonderfully for the few projects I've used it for. To cover mobile development, I recommend looking at ionic framework to start out with. It can connect just fine to a backend like parse.com. There are no shortage of business and information driven apps (that pay well) that this technology can create with one code base for all end points. There is a great case to build native apps once something like this solves a problem. If you want to get into mobile development from a higher level to explore, I really recommend a tool like appery.io. It was dicey before in places but now has ionic built in, it's a fantastic prototyping tool for JS apps. Beyond this, I've always had a crush on Python and want to spend more time with it, but for now Javascript keeps me moving along. Feel free to reach out if you wanna chat, you sound like you have a lot of experience already. |