[aeontech]

Yep, absolutely. Python has taken off in a major way for data science / machine learning work, but Ruby is still a fantastic option for web apps and for general purpose programming, with a great community. You can be productive in it very very quickly.

I may be biased, but I find Rails and Ruby conventions still more intuitive and less surprising than Django, especially when onboarding new people.

[tartoran]

Thanks for the insight. I’ll start looking into it more.

[oblio]

Keep in mind opportunity cost. In the average city across the world, I'd say that the order in which you get a job as a developer is:

1. Javascript.

2. Java.

3. Python.

4. C#.

5. C/C++.

I'm also weighing each of the against the difficulty of learning the language and the ecosystem.

Ruby could be nice but I doubt it breaks top 10 anymore. Your mileage may vary.

[aeontech]

I think if you ask ten developers, you'll get ten different rankings like this, with minor overlap :)

It's going to be really really really dependent on your field of work, your career experience and network.

I'm not even going to attempt to offer a top five list, because I'm sure it will be wrong :D

FWIW, I would not base your decision on what language to learn only (or even mainly) based on "what's the most common language in use".

There's more than enough work in the world in all common languages, unless you're talking about really obscure research langs.

There's also value in getting expertise in something more niche - because fewer people know it, you can make a bigger impact and have less competition. It's also a powerful status signal - if you tell me you enjoy working in "Python and Haskell" or "Ruby and Erlang", versus "C# and Java" I'll have a very different impression of you (as unfair as that may be).

In summary, I'd say, try out a few languages, and learn the ones that you enjoy the most and feel most productive in. You'll spend most of your waking hours thinking in it, you might as well pick something that is fun for you to express yourself in, rather than a language that you have to fight.