Hack and HHVM

[eluser]jonez[/eluser]
This is just my opinion, but as someone who has been programming for ~20y I would not recommend using Hack. Stick with industry standards or you'll waste a lot of time learning something only to find you'll never use it in your career. How many companies use Hack as their development platform? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd guess very few.

The exceptions to this are if you are self employed, or just want to learn something new. Any spare time you spend learning a language not applicable to your career is a waste IMO. Concentrate on subjects that will further your career goals and ignore everything else.

If you are interested in learning a new language/methodology I'd recommend Node. Today, and in the future this will be one of the best skills you can have on your resume.

A few frameworks that are big right now:

Angular - made by Google, large community

Ember - similar to Angular and also has a large community, bonus of not being a Google product. You never know if/when they'll drop support, they do this all the time with services. Will Angular be the next Silverlight? We'll see.

Hood.ie - no backend app lives on the client (offline mode!), still in development but has features PHP and most other frameworks will never be capable of