As I look around the web at the various languages that I could potentially learn, I find myself thinking about the near future. Ten to twenty years from now, where will technology be? Will browsers as we know them still exist? Will 90 percent of people use mobile operating systems at that time? These questions hinder me in my decision on which languages to learn.
I am afraid that if I were to learn something like Ruby or PHP, my skillset could very well become obsolete in the years to come. I feel as though apps will one day replace websites, and mobile devices will heavily outweigh the use of traditional computers. I could be wrong.
What do you think will become of this industry? What languages do you think will persist and which do you think will burn out?
Doesn’t matter. Probably none of them will be around in any form that we know them today. If you can’t adjust, then you’re left behind. The paradigm could shift and we may not be doing web any more. Java or PHP from 10-15 years ago is not the same environment as today. The syntax hasn’t changed much, but syntax is easy. The environments have both changed drastically. The only thing that isn’t going to change, is the fact that you’ll need to change.
I feel the opposite way. I can’t think of many reasons why something would be a native app and many sites are going away from trying to get you to download their app that you’ll never use. Apps themselves are shifting heavily towards using web based technologies, with things like Phone Gap and React Native.
Once you know one language of a particular type then learning more languages of that type will just get easier and easier.
Object Oriented type languages are popular enough that there will be OOP languages around for many years even if the particular ones around now disappear.
