The JavaScript community grew by an impressive four million users in the past 12 months, solidifying its status as the most widely-used programming language globally.
It’s because it’s a great language. Legitimately cannot understand why anyone would dislike it, especially with the the ES5+ editions and the advent of Typescript.
I started with C#, and have used Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby in professional capacities and still find Typescript to be my favourite by a significant margin.
Which is faster, getting a squiggle instantly or discovering a silly bug at runtime later? So happy I could write code in Typescript and be confident it would do what I expected when it ran without digging out the debugger.
As much as people like to make fun of JS/TS, I think you’re right, especially compared to the languages you mentioned. It’s my second-favorite language after Rust.
I think I would put Swift above it as well, except I don’t really use it since it’s too domain-specific in practice.
The newest iteration of the language might be okay, but the ecosystem is an absolute mess.
Working with npm projects is always a pain, everything changes all the time for no reason, and often enough in subtle ways you can’t anticipate.
Plus, there’s just an army of not very good and/or inexperienced developers vomiting their incompetence into the ecosystem.
Languages are not isolated. Java doesn’t force abstractFactoryBuilders, yet hundreds of developers follow that pattern. So Java in practice is rather verbose.
The language and its standard libraries lead developers towards common patterns. Javascript’s standard library is pretty sparse excluding browser-only web apis, so there are tons of external libraries to fill the gap for better or worse.
It’s because it’s a great language. Legitimately cannot understand why anyone would dislike it, especially with the the ES5+ editions and the advent of Typescript.
I started with C#, and have used Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby in professional capacities and still find Typescript to be my favourite by a significant margin.
I worked for a company that refused to use TypeScript because it “slowed devs down”. It was…a laughable period in my life.
Which is faster, getting a squiggle instantly or discovering a silly bug at runtime later? So happy I could write code in Typescript and be confident it would do what I expected when it ran without digging out the debugger.
While the rest of the world shifted left dudes went ahead and shifted right
As much as people like to make fun of JS/TS, I think you’re right, especially compared to the languages you mentioned. It’s my second-favorite language after Rust.
I think I would put Swift above it as well, except I don’t really use it since it’s too domain-specific in practice.
The newest iteration of the language might be okay, but the ecosystem is an absolute mess.
Working with npm projects is always a pain, everything changes all the time for no reason, and often enough in subtle ways you can’t anticipate.
Plus, there’s just an army of not very good and/or inexperienced developers vomiting their incompetence into the ecosystem.
Languages are not isolated. Java doesn’t force abstractFactoryBuilders, yet hundreds of developers follow that pattern. So Java in practice is rather verbose.
The language and its standard libraries lead developers towards common patterns. Javascript’s standard library is pretty sparse excluding browser-only web apis, so there are tons of external libraries to fill the gap for better or worse.
B-b-b-but you can’t do that!!1! What if my customer wants to calculate
5+"three"*[]???