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'State of JavaScript' Survey Results: Good News for React and TypeScript (sdtimes.com)
"The JavaScript world is richer and messier than ever," reports this year's annual "State of JavaScript" survey, which collected data from over 28,000 developers on everything from favorite frameworks to flavors of JavaScript. SD Times reports:
"A few years back, a JavaScript survey would've been a simple matter. Question 1: are you using jQuery? Question 2: any comments? Boom, done!," the developers wrote. "But as we all know, things have changed. The JavaScript ecosystem is richer than ever, and even the most experienced developer can start to hesitate when considering the multitude of options available at every stage"...
On the front end, React remains the dominant framework. However, the survey found interest in Vue is steadily increasing, while Angular is losing steam. Developers are at a 3.8 [on a scale up to 5] when it comes to their overall happiness with front-end tools. On the back end, Express is by far the most popular contender with Koa, Meteor and Hapi slowly making their way behind Express. For testing, Jest and Enzyme stand out with high satisfaction ratings.
In 2016 only 9,000 developers responded for the survey, which had ultimately announced that "Depending on who you ask, right now JavaScript is either turning into a modern, reliable language, or a bloated, overly complex dependency hell. Or maybe both?"
InfoWorld notes that this year 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. And while React was the most popular framework, the second most-popular framework was "none," with 9,493 JavaScript developers saying they didn't use one.
On the front end, React remains the dominant framework. However, the survey found interest in Vue is steadily increasing, while Angular is losing steam. Developers are at a 3.8 [on a scale up to 5] when it comes to their overall happiness with front-end tools. On the back end, Express is by far the most popular contender with Koa, Meteor and Hapi slowly making their way behind Express. For testing, Jest and Enzyme stand out with high satisfaction ratings.
In 2016 only 9,000 developers responded for the survey, which had ultimately announced that "Depending on who you ask, right now JavaScript is either turning into a modern, reliable language, or a bloated, overly complex dependency hell. Or maybe both?"
InfoWorld notes that this year 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. And while React was the most popular framework, the second most-popular framework was "none," with 9,493 JavaScript developers saying they didn't use one.
Look at the options for the "per-library survey results":
[ ] I've never heard of it
[ ] I've HEARD of it, and am NOT interested
[ ] I've HEARD of it, and WOULD like to learn it
[ ] I've USED it before, and would NOT use it again
[ ] I've USED it before, and WOULD use it again
Notice there's no option for "I've actually deployed it to a production platform and it has been running stably for a year." I can attest that every interview candidate tells me they've used Angular 2/4/5 before, because they went through the tutorial. So be careful when using these results.
I am on a project that started with Angular 1, then took a significant delay to move it to Angular 2, even when it was in beta, because we thought it was more stable and it was the future. Now, it's #5 in the "Ive USED it before and WOULD use it again" category. Our latest front-end developer is threatening a coup unless we move to Angular 5 (which is actually quite easy, but still - WTH?) There's just no winning here! We can't develop stable software if the platforms lifetime is shorter than the time it takes to get a product to market!
TypeScript seems to fix nearly everything I had a problem with regarding Javascript. And if you are using Angular and follow 90%+ of the instructional material out there you are using TypeScript. I had spent years avoiding Javascript and learned what I needed but without much enthusiasm.
The funny thing is that I don't really need strong type checking for designing my app. My IDE (WebStorm) needs strong type checking in order to be more helpful to me. Without TypeScript it is forced to make a lot of hellacious guesses (mostly wrong) about code completion. With the current version it is almost as solid as if I were programming Java.
The cherry on top is that I can still be as careless and sloppy as I want the way Javascript alone allows. Occasionally that is actually helpful. So all win for me.