Full disclosure: I have been around a while and have written in more languages than I care to even share at the moment. Right now my go to is Ruby with Rails. However, since you say you are a junior level engineer with Java experience, why not stick with Java? Recently there was a great article on HN about using Java for Everything and it made some very good and logical arguments for going with Java. [1][2]

We see questions like this on HN quite often. When starting a new project that you would like to support yourself on, you must ask "Would I like to make a successful SaaS product?" or "Would I like to learn a new language/framework/ecosystem?". I am sure some would argue that the language/framework/ecosystem can really make or break a web application. However, there are successful business built on just about all of them:

Stackoverflow - .Net

Facebook - PHP

Amazon - Java

Bloomberg - Ruby (could have said Twitter until recently they are migrating to Java, interesting?)

Reddit - Python

DuckDuckGo - Perl

Orbitz - Lisp

OkCupid - C++

Of course many of these organizations use a number of languages and frameworks. The point is, when they started they used what they knew and went with it. My suggestion, start building! Then someday I can use your super successful application in a list like this!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8677556 [2] http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything...

> But since it’s trendy people try to apply it to everything.

When people do things you don't understand, don't just say that they're just doing it because it's fashionable. Sure, they might be — or they have their own reasons.

I use Rust in a couple of places outside of its original "systems programming" niche, where, yeah, I don't really need to track every allocation, I don't care about GC pauses, I don't need to ship one single binary, and the overhead of a runtime wouldn't bother me. Things like Web servers for side projects, or small scripts to do a task I need to automate.

However, I found that:

• The effort it took to bring Rust out of its niche, and the time it took to learn the domain-specific libraries for my use cases (Rocket for Web stuff; duct for shell script stuff) was less than I thought;

• The amount of knowledge I needed to retain to use a programming language effectively — the components of its standard library, common third-party helper libraries, how to navigate the documentation, how to fix mistakes, how to avoid traps and pitfalls, how to structure your program, how to handle differences between language versions — was much larger than I thought!

So I stick with Rust for non-systems tasks because the benefits outweigh the detriments for me.

(Granted, I was only able to do this because I already knew my way around the language and the borrow checker; if you already know, say, Python, you can make this exact same argument in reverse. But then you need to know how to wield Python for low-level programming as well as high-level programming.)

I read an article a few years ago called Java for Everything[1] (which was discussed here on HN[2]) that makes the same point, only with Java. If I had to pick an "everything language", I don't think it would be 2014-era Java, but the article did sell me on the benefits of having an "everything language" in the first place, and I feel the same benefits apply here with Rust.

[1]: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everythin... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8677556