[thelist] Suggestions for the next technology to learn

[Simon Willison]

Paul Bennett wrote:
> I have achieved a level of comfortable proficiency with PHP, a working 
> knowledge of web standards (XHTML / CSS), accessibility issues, XML, 
> client side scripting,  mobile application development (WML only at this 
> stage, although wap 2.0 is XHTML base  anyway) , and have been 
> considering investing some time into learning another server-side 
> technology.

I've been having a lot of fun with Python over the past year, and have 
recently moved up to using it as a server side technology via mod_python 
on Apache. The great thing about Python is it is a truly general purpose 
language - you can use it to write simple command line scripts, web 
applications, GUI driven programs, network clients and servers - pretty 
much anything. Getting a job working with Python is hard because few 
people have heard of it, but if you learn it you'll have a tool for life 
(and who knows, it could be The Next Big Thing).

Cheers,

Simon