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Free online courses -- also called Massive Open Online Courses -- have quite a year. An anonymous reader shares a blog post: It's been seven years since these courses rose to prominence, when a few Stanford professors decided to offer their courses online free. Since then over over 900 universities have launched over 11,000 courses. And in its seven years these Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have achieved new milestone: 100 million plus learners. [...] At the end of every year, I do an extensive analysis of the MOOC space. To help me with analysis, I send the top MOOC providers a set of questions, one of them being the top enrolled courses of 2018.

The list below contains the top enrolled courses from the major MOOC providers: Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn. Combined, these providers represent a big chunk of the MOOC learners (70 million plus). Without further ado, here are the most popular free online university courses of 2018:
Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects from University of California, San Diego.
Machine Learning from Stanford University.
The Science of Well-Being from Yale University.
Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
CS50's Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard University.

This week a Paris-born designer/developer (now living in Osaka) announced the results of the third annual "State of JavaScript" survey of over 20,000 JavaScript developers in 153 countries "to figure out what they're using, what they're happy with, and what they want to learn."

An anonymous reader writes: Among its findings? The number of people who have used Microsoft's TypeScript and said they would use it again has increased from 20.08% in 2016 to 46.7% in 2018, "and in some countries that ratio even went over 50%." More than 7,000 respondents indicated they liked its "robust, less error-prone code" and another 5,500 cited "elegant programming style and patterns." A blog post announcing the results declares TypeScript "the clear leader" among other syntaxes and languages that can compile to JavaScript.

Meanwhile, when it comes to frameworks, "only React has both a high satisfaction ratio and a large user base, although Vue is definitely getting there." Elsewhere the report notes Vue has already overtaken React for certain metrics such as total GitHub stars. "Angular on the other hand does boast a large user base, but its users don't seem too happy," the announcement adds, although later the report argues that Angular's poor satisfaction ratio "is probably in part due to the confusion between Angular and the older, deprecated AngularJS (previous surveys avoided this issue by featuring both as separate items)."
94% of the survey's respondents were male, and "Years of experience" for the respondents seemed to cluster in three cohorts in the demographics breakdown: 27.8% of respondents reported they had 2-5 years of experience, while 28% reported 5-10 years, and 24% reported 10-20 years.

There's a beautiful interactive graphic visualizing "connections between technologies," where a circle's outer red band is segmented based on the popularity of JavaScript libraries, while hovering over each band reveals the popularity of other libraries with its users. But while this year's results were presented on a "dark mode" web page, the survey's announcement concedes that this year's trends didn't include many surprises.

"TL;DR: things didn't change that much this year."

"The JavaScript world could use a bit of classification," reads this year's announcement at StateofJS.com: In 2017 this survey helped us do just that, by collecting data from over 20,000 developers to identify current and upcoming trends. This year, we're asking for your help once more to find out which libraries developers want to learn next, which have the best satisfaction ratings, and much more.
The survey launched in 2016 "mostly to scratch my own itch," its founder explained in a Medium essay. "I wanted to know what libraries were worth learning, and which ones were on the way out." Last year's survey discovered that React was the dominant framework, though the second most-popular framework was "none," with 9,493 JavaScript developers saying they didn't use one. Vue had increased in popularity while Angular lost steam, and developers collectively rating their overall happiness with front-end tools at 3.8 (on a scale up to five).

And more than 28% of the survey's respondent's said they'd used TypeScript, Microsoft's typed superset of JavaScript, and that they'd use it again.