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'State of JavaScript 2018' Survey Announced (stateofjs.com)
"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.
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.
- 80% are ads, web trackers and other malware
- 10% are useless eye candy that waste time and CPU
- 5% are misguided attempts to turn web browsers into terminals and bypassing HTML as much as possible, that usually result in unusable interfaces that don't behave properly and waste CPU
- 5% are actually useful on the pages they're used on
Javascript isn't the problem, it's the developers who foist it on us because they're incompetent, greedy or nefarious. Still, I can't count the number of hours I waste every week trying to find out in Noscript or uBlock the minimal number of scripts I have to allow to access a web page. Fuck Javascript.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I have known some Javascript ever since it was invented and spent decades avoiding it as much as possible. I can't remember who it was but they wrote that "Javascript is the most feared language" in computer science.
Now that I am doing client-side web apps it is unavoidable. Except, of course, for Microsoft wonderful effort into Typescript. It takes away none of Javascript's "strengths" (such as they are) but it makes it possible to get serious assistance from your IDE. You end up not as constrained as Java but you feel less like you are tossed into a chaotic lake of famished crocodiles, horny hippos and drunk rednecks in speedboats firing guns everywhere.
Thanks to Typescript I don't feel like I am writing Javascript any more than I feel like I am writing in assembly language when I code in C. Only an occasional trip to w3schools or stackoverflow is all that is needed to cover the quirky things I didn't know.
That said, I always wonder why anyone can be in doubt about why Javascript is so ascendant. There can be no reason other than it had access to the pervasive API of the browser environment. In other words the DOM and the browser-provided objects. That, and the fact that the build environment and the runtime environment were one and the same, helping countless legions of amateurs to get "into" web programming.
With all its flaws Javascript fell into a mucky pond and evolved into an ecosystem were a lot of people could make a living from using it. That's what made it successful. It has little or nothing to do with the merits (or demerits) of the language itself.
Imagine if Google had created node.js first, and all browsers were using some other language like Python. Nobody but a quirky minority would pay any attention to Javascript whatever. Now pretty much all of us have to pay attention.
In C, there's a basis. It's near machine level and machines don't see data types. Types in C are a sugar to make life easier.
JavaScript is not machine level. It has no excuse. Same goes for Python.
Once you go past the very low level, you should have strongly typed languages because type means something then. It's a real thing that's independent of the machine.
It would be interesting to see an Adascript or an Eiffelscript.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wow! 2018 and Slashdot still can't handle simple Unicode like ellipses. No combining characters, just a simple two-byte UTF-8 sequence.
Too bad it was written in Perl and not JavaScript. :-D
(Yes, I know Perl supports Unicode now. Yes, I know server-side JavaScript only existed as Netscape's proprietary LiveScript at the time. But it's been 20 years. Talk about living in the past. Can I even do a Euro character? Are they still on ISO-8859-1 or have at least updated to ISO-8859-15?)
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Why would you turn strict mode off mid-way through a file or function?
Fun fact: "use strict" was derived from Perl, the language Slashdot is written in.
Fun fact #2: JavaScript is also used on the server side where script tag hacks are unnecessary.
Fun fact #3: The vast majority of folks don't specify version anymore. No point really with current browser usage. Perhaps your knowledge of JavaScript is out of date?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I don't care about the latest fashion trends. Javascript isn't able to meet basic requirements that have been standards for decades.
Technically I was just mocking Slashdot's inability to handle standard multibyte character encodings like UTF-8. Typically I would not recommend rewriting a working codebase simply to switch languages.
But since you brought it up, yes, I think in 2018 it would make more sense to write a web site in JavaScript than Perl. Go would be my choice for something where I would be looking at C but want internet-capable services.
Python is a (slightly) more elegant language, but the V8 engine eats the various Python VMs' lunches at this point in all relevant metrics: speed, memory usage, available libraries, and developer pool. (Python handily beats JS for machine learning and finance though due to available libraries.)
For something like Slashdot, I think Java is unnecessary. There isn't a whole lot of business logic needed in the middleware, and this is where Java shines.
Node is more than sufficient to handle the likes of Slashdot, though honestly algorithm trumps language every day of the week and twice on payday.
And yes, I have coded all of them at one time or another in a professional capacity.
But back to my original point: it's 2018 and therefore laughable that any website lacks end-to-end Unicode support.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.