

Ask HN: What language will be most useful in 5 years? - mohsen

If you had to pick a language and learn the living hell out of it so that 4-5 years from now you'd be extremely in demand, what would that language be?  Why do you think so?
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davidw
Wrong mentality: you want to be able to able to pick up whatever's current or
interesting or required, and do so easily because you have the experience and
flexibility to do so. This means you should probably learn C, Java, some
functional language, and one of Ruby or Python. Extra points for assembler, as
well as Forth, Lisp, Prolog or other 'mind benders'.

That said, you can bet there will still be Java and Cobol jobs in 5 years.

In terms of more "fun" things... Ruby and Python will still be around, so will
Javascript. Likewise PHP but I don't consider it much fun.

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smcl
Interesting, I took the OP's question to mean spoken language rather than
programming language. Looks like it could be either.

I'd go for Swedish, as Sweden is a really cool place I'd dearly love to spend
more time in (if I could afford it :))

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RiderOfGiraffes

      > ... so that 4-5 years from now you'd be
      > extremely in demand, what ...
    

I can't see how that could be mistaken for talking about a spoken language,
but your interpretation has certainly twisted my mind. Thank you.

To answer question I thought the OP was asking, I'd offer COBOL and ForTran.
There is still a lot of legacy code out there, and fewer and fewer people who
have a chance to maintain it.

~~~
smcl
Admittedly my answer didn't include anything to justify the "extremely in
demand" part - my brain went into dreamland briefly.

A lot of people talk about how Chinese would be a key language to know for
conducting business in the mid-to-long term, which is what I thought he was
driving at. Though I imagine you need longer than 4-5 years to be useful at
Chinese, as per this previous HN story -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368051>

