What web programming language should I learn?

Picking a career and deciding on the skills that you’ll be proficient is daunting task. It feels like you are predicting your future.

We had a developer consult with our Formed team about changing from MeteorJS to Ruby on Rails.

Our team is a startup. We are trying to make decisions loose but fast. The sooner we can validate our app idea, the better.

As for developement, we were currently making more progress to date using MeteorJS. Switching to Rails seems counter intuitive.

The Questions

• Do I really want to learn Ruby?
• Is learning Ruby going to do great things for my career?
• Where are Ruby and other programming languages in their lifecycle?

Using Google Trends to Answer

I decided to dig into Google Trends as a way to see the lifecycle of developement trends. I was hoping this would give me some insight on how I might make this choice.

Interpreting Developement Trends

The visual of Google search volume that Google Trends graphs out means something different products, digital content (blog posts and videos) and programming languages.

For programming languages, let’s break down the up and down trend.

#Why an up trend of coding languages?

• language is gaining interest and followers
• new developers are running into problems and are searching for answers

#Why a down trend of coding languages

• less interest in the language
• bugs are getting squished
• questions are getting answered (stackoverflow), and it only takes one search to find an answer

Here is the screencast I made as I think out loud. I compare NodeJS, MeteorJS, PHP and Ruby.

If you dig this post and video, send me a tweet.

If you’re interested in coding, checkout Treehouse. If you’re looking for your next gig, Hired is the way to go.