I think (hope?) that the next wave in hacking will be understanding programming paradigms better as hackers - the specifics of language choice will probably matter a little less. I like the idea of languages that support multiple paradigms internally (e.g., you can embed logic programming into your functional programming language). A while back I spent some time reading Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming and I wish I had found this book earlier in my career. I probably wasn't ready for it though.
This aspect of software development was largely missing from my formal educational experience in programming language paradigms.
What I am trying to do now is develop a better "taste" for what is "easy" using one programming paradigm compared to another. I'd ultimately like to have a better problem to paradigm mapping internalized. I've toyed with the idea of putting together a seminar or undergrad course to do flesh this out.
The elephant in the room is more market based - what programming languages will someone pay you to use in the future? We already have a number of interesting programming languages. But when you do your job search these days, I see a small number of large buckets. The .Net/CLR C# world, Java in the enterprise, Ruby (really the Rails framework, but even so), and a strong side of the data storage backend of your choice (RDBMs or NoSQL or sexps - kidding on that, pg keeps our own forum in files full of sexps).
I'm surprised you included Rails in that list. While there are quite a few Rails jobs, it pales in comparison to what's available for .NET and J2EE. Even PHP blows it away by pure number of jobs.
Unfortunately those search queries are worse than "ballpark" figures as they're mostly based on keyword matching, not the amount of code the developer is writing in that language for that job.
There are certain search queries that will always hit high. Of course, JavaScript is going to be in almost any job posting that's web-related, even if it's not true hardcore JS coding. Perl is used heavily for development automation, so it's also going to have a big showing, even if it isn't the core language. You'll also tend to see lines like "Previous scripting experience with Perl, Python, Ruby a plus" for Java postings.
If it could be monetized, doing more sophisticated data mining into job postings for actual popularity trends would be awesome, especially with a decent granularity. It wouldn't be difficult to train a supervised ML algorithm with a set of keyword-tagged job postings with weights as to how significant a certain set of skills would be used at a job for a certain job posting.
This aspect of software development was largely missing from my formal educational experience in programming language paradigms.
What I am trying to do now is develop a better "taste" for what is "easy" using one programming paradigm compared to another. I'd ultimately like to have a better problem to paradigm mapping internalized. I've toyed with the idea of putting together a seminar or undergrad course to do flesh this out.
The elephant in the room is more market based - what programming languages will someone pay you to use in the future? We already have a number of interesting programming languages. But when you do your job search these days, I see a small number of large buckets. The .Net/CLR C# world, Java in the enterprise, Ruby (really the Rails framework, but even so), and a strong side of the data storage backend of your choice (RDBMs or NoSQL or sexps - kidding on that, pg keeps our own forum in files full of sexps).