The Old Development Language Switcheroo

As a C# developer I think I’m pretty safe in saying that its not going away any time soon however, its my opinion that to not become irrelevant you need to have options. Some may argue that its better to be master of one than a Jack of all trades but lets just say you can’t find your next job in the primary language you want to work in. What do you do?

I have looked more into JavaScript recently and with that comes server and client scope for the use of the language so with some understanding of JS that would be probably the best bet for me however, as much as this may annoy some I think I actually prefer statically typed languages.

Now I know there is TypeScript that I could use for my node.js apps but I see that as more of a workaround and not a core feature of JavaScript. I’m not saying anything bad against JS and the libraries/frameworks that I have used I like but I just find it easier to learn and know what I can do when I have decent intellisense showing me what I can do with my code.

You could argue that I could go back to my first language of Delphi or I could look into C++, Java or PHP but my counter argument might just be laughter. In my opinion these are old languages. They may be reliable for some needs but I feel its looking back to the past somewhat and not looking forward.

I have recently come across Dart and want to spend some time looking into it to see if we suit each other.

Dart is a class-based, object-oriented language with lexical scoping, closures, and optional static typing. Dart helps you build structured modern web apps and is easy to learn for a wide range of developers.

There is also F# which I need to look at as my Twitter timeline has more and more references to this language.

There is also Kotlin but that’s as much as I know about it, the name. I think its based on Java and that rings alarm bells for me but I’m sure @Cranialstrain will put me right.

There is also Go and I’m sure there are many others that I could find but rightly or wrongly when deciding upon a language which lets be honest is a big investment you need to know there are the available jobs out there in that language. Its nice to learn new stuff and I highly recommend it but for me a whole new investment in a language has to warrant some pay offs such as employment.

I can’t say for sure what language I’d use if I had to change, at present most likely JavaScript but probably that is based out of limited options on my part, maybe I need to become a better polyglot programmer and learn some more languages to have better “options” and not become irrelevant.

Let me know what your primary language is and what you’d jump to if you had to.