Watch the video or read the blog post - whatever one you prefer! The content is basically the same on both :)

Here’s a common misconception in the development realm: “I need to pick the best language and framework or it’ll be outdated in months / the jobs will dry up”.

As developers, sometimes we place too much pressure on ourselves to pick the “best” or the “right” framework and language combination to learn. There is no best or right framework. Only best and right for you and the task at hand.

The 2 Reasons We Think This Misconception Exists

Quite simply;

• Over-opinionated Senior Developers or “Bandwagon Developers” that want to hate on a particular language and/or framework. Sometimes, these people are become ideological Evangelists (obsessed and think it’s the best ever) for a particular language / framework / methodology. *Please don’t be one of these people. Being open-minded to different tech stacks is a sign of an excellent developer!
• We worry that we’ll spend months training in a particular discipline to get a job and a salary that we want and the tech stack we use will become out of date. We simply don't want to waste all of that time to have to retrain.

So the 4 reasons in this post are going to directly address those points, and provide you reasons to stop caring about this trivial issue.

1) Close-minded developers perpetuate that there’s a best framework or language from a place of ego.

And the reason we know it’s ego is because for every one utterance of “PHP is terrible” or ”OOP is an anti-pattern”, you’ll find 100 very well architected, nice to work on applications that scale to the millions built with these very technologies.

This bias against or towards certain tech stacks gets extreme when people start hating on certain technologies in a general sense.

2) Tech stacks don’t just disappear from the job radar in a matter of months

You worry you’ll train in Angular but hear loads of opinionated devs saying how React is going to take the lead and everything will become irrelevant?

There are still jobs for old frontend frameworks going that 99.9% have probably never even HEARD of, let alone a leader like Angular.

The reality is, if you pick a leading framework in a language where it has a stronghold in the language it’s in, you’re going to be fine

3) Even if your tech stack goes out of date, you will adapt to a new one

Adaptability is another sign of an excellent developer - and you can learn it. Heck, you’re already learning whatever you’ve chosen to learn - and once you get there, it will be 10x easier to learn the next framework or language you pick (unless you’re going from JavaScript to Assembler...)

4) It will lead you into narrow minded thinking that hinders your growth as a developer

Maybe those over-opinionated developers have a point. Their narrow view on what the best framework is enables them to feel safe in their job, and they feel good in the knowledge that they’re working with the best technologies out there.

What we’ve came across instead though, is developers who are so unable to have a conversation about anything other than the thing they work in, and create such inhospitable atmospheres when it comes to talking about the “thing they hate”, that they are in a little bubble and don’t tend to learn much beyond what they know.

They might be right, they might be wrong, but this is the mindset that causes people to get stuck on working with a framework that had 10K downloads a day a few years ago, and in the present hasn't received security patches for months and probably gets downloaded < 10 times a day.

Staying in that place will halt your progress and hold you back from the wealth of new technology available in this day and age.

So what are some more practical criteria for picking a language and framework?

Here’s what we go by when trying to advise newbies;

• Look at the type of work you want to do (Websites, Mobile Apps, Desktop Applications, Machine Learning, Games) and look for the highest proportion of languages and frameworks used for that discipline. Pick one that you think has the best community.
• Something with LTS support is also great - although anything can have LTS - chances are that it’s got it because the community uses it regularly because it’s high quality and has been used in thousands of enterprise projects.
• Something with a wealth of resources from tutors that you like available - since you have such an abundance of choice, you could hop between a few languages and browse DEV, YouTube etc looking for tutorial posts and see which has better resources for you.
• If you’re looking at this as a career choice, look at the jobs in your area and try find the commonly used languages and frameworks - it might be a good idea to go for those

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