| What world do you want to chain yourself to for the next several years? Do you have any immediate requirements to be on the MS platform? is linux or unix fine? Do your requirements concern high concurrency? Do your requirements concern science? You are an engineer and there are some specific things that may come in handy for your type of work. Python has some major libraries for use in the scientific community as well as statistical analysis libraries to do similar tasks to Matlab / R for building graphs and such. You talk about using CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla. These are all PHP-based CMSs which dynamically read data from a SQL database. Do you want to continue working with similar code? Or do you want to jump into the world of a new language? Microsoft (C#.NET MVC2)
Linux/Unix (Python(django, pylons), ruby(Ruby on Rails), PHP(Symfony2, Zend2, Laravel, list goes on), Perl(Mojolicious, Catalyst, etc not sure the rest), Java(GWT, Wicket, Play, Grails), you could literally roll a dice and figure out what you want to follow. If you want to go for trendy, in order of trendy:
Ruby, Python, Java, go-lang, Closure, PHP All these languages are generally accepted as general purpose except for PHP. As the PHP community matures more however, this is changing, especially for deployment tools, general cli scripts to accomplish tasks which often times in the past would be a bash/shell script. What ever you do, before you make your decision, I think the best determining factor is ask your own colleagues what they are learning and follow suite, especially if it's within one of these listed languages. This will help you if you run into problems since you will already have an established support network of friends for help. Hope that's useful. |