Ask HN: PHP vs Rails vs obj C vs scala

Scala / Ruby are viewed as "fun" languages as well. You might as well try everything... you might find a groove quickly in one of them.

Not sure why they're not on your list, but I was pretty much in your shoes a few months ago and am having a lot of fun with these at the moment.

motivation a- expand the mind.

If that is the case and you know c/c++, I would say, go with scala as it is the farthest afield from what you already know.

motivation b- develop a marketable skill.

If that is the case, then I've always been of the opinion that it is better to develop skills that others don't have. If you learn PHP, you've learned a commodity skill. If you learn scala, you are in a select few for the time being and although their might be fewer jobs, there will also be less competition for them and you can probably charge more. I don't know what the going rate for Rails developers is now but a couple years ago, it was crazy high because the demand outstripped the supply.

If you want to do web stuff I think Ruby and Python would be better choices. If you want to avoid the learning curve of Rails, you can start off doing stuff with Sinatra instead, and mostly just tackle the Ruby learning curve first.

For objC, I can think of a few iPhone apps I could work on to learn the platform. For things like PHP, Rails, Scala (where you'll need a good amount of traffic to really excel at them and get real world experience beyond some small hello-world-like web-apps), how does one get involved with the complicated/ involved stuff ?

as one of the commenter pointed out about bad programming habits with PHP, a framework will give you guidelines on good coding practices. It'll also help you develop faster and it's also quite easy to integrate with the front-end. CakePHP is like Rails framework but for PHP