What is creative strategy development?

I'm a 40 year old strategy consultant who wants to get back into software development. What languages should l consider learning?

• I'm 40 and have been doing strategy/management consulting for 12 years. Earlier in my career I did technology work (HTML and ASP in the late 90s). I want to get back into technology, and especially development. I'm not looking to become a day-to-day developer per se, but believe passionately in the intersection of business strategy and technology and hence the need to be fluent in technology. I also like the craft and "making" of software development. I've been doing a little Ruby on Rails and enjoy it. Is that a good choice? Or should I be choosing some more leading edge technologies (node.js?)? More interested in back-end than front-end.

• Answer:

  If you really have total freedom of choice, Scala is blowing up, along with functional programming in general, actually. Try that, perhaps. Other than that, the most mainstream options are PHP, Python and RoR, yeah, with Node biting aggressively at their ankles, but the paradigms and practices are very similar in all of them so learning one will make it somewhat easy to learn the others. Word of caution - Javascript is, like PHP, not a very clean or well formed language. You might pick up some bad practices if you go into those two first. My suggestion would be focus on RoR (since you're already waist deep in it) and Scala for a proper scalable back end. That combo should be deadly.