It seems to me that modern web dev happens mostly in JavaScript. The driving reason for this is so apps can be wrapped to be like native apps, and have a level

It seems to me that modern web dev happens mostly in JavaScript. The driving reason for this is so apps can be wrapped to be like native apps, and have a level of state and data persistence. The trend in modern web apps is to send a lot of data down as JSON, and only do serverside rendering in cases where you need SEO or incredible rendering speed. You make a choice between angular, ember, bootstrap+handlebars, roll your own, or a few others. On the back-end, there is a similar array of very reasonable non-real-time frameworks, mostly centered around Python (Django, Flask, etc.), Ruby on Rails, or the newish and sexy and real-timish node.js. Go is apparently pretty popular on HN, and imagine it's not the same academic trap that Haskell is, but I've never touched the stuff. I find Google programming tools to be very good usually (AppEngine, Angular, Chrome dev tools). Your data store that underlies all of this depends heavily on your application. You can still get plenty of mileage out of MySQL, or Postgres for geo apps, but there is a large community building on top of NoSQL type data stores too. These are my impressions from having done web dev 4-5 years ago, then focusing mostly on mobile, then having some web projects under my management again recently. The shift to JavaScript became apparent to me when our engineers looked at and chose technologies. I personally was doing a lot of client-rendered Javascript ("web app style") 5 years ago for TrailBehind.com, and it seems like the whole world works that way now, just more high-tech with HTML compilers and templating and more.