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Microsoft's TypeScript Dominates In 'State of JavaScript 2018' Report (stateofjs.com)
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."
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."
Frameworks that came out about 5 years ago, love it!
Javascript is like special olympics. Even if you make best java scripts you are still the retarded.
I've used the JS on and off since 2006. I've been through the JQueries and a few other works of frame, but only recently started looking into the TS. It feels a tiny bit like a merge of .NET and JS to me.
This says more about what's missing in JavaScript that people want than any success for Microsoft. I guess inheritance is useful after all.
94% male out of 20000 people. Cue the alarmists saying that men are preventing women from learning JavaScript.
You used to be able to give a HTML/CSS guy a Photoshop file and they could produce all the static content for the developer.
Now with all these frameworks and JavaScript ecosystem these people feel overwhelmed and you end up needed someone with a technical background to do something which needs more of a visual eye
... of MS for once not screwing up open source. They've regained some karma with me. It's a long way to go but a good start. As for JS transpiled client and server-side web development there is no better way to go right now than with TypeScript and VSCode. Tooling and integration is excellent and VSCode is feature rich and really surprisingly performant.
Both come recommended from yours truly. And it's about 25 years ago I've said something like this of an MS product.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Executive summaries go UP TOP, EditorDavid. And in fact, that's what the summary is supposed to be. So if you STILL think you need to add a "TL;DR" at the bottom... you just announced to the world that YOU SUCK AS AN EDITOR, EditorDavid.
I've no version 11.0++/3.0++ & gweihir KNOWS u IMPERSONATE me https://it.slashdot.org/commen... c6gunner proves it https://linux.slashdot.org/com... he forgot to SUBMIT as AC & using his registered 'lusrname' instead (because he tried to mock me both BEFORE & after I FAIRLY challenged him to show he's done better work - he had ZERO).
& NO WAY I'd "cry" like you "playing victim ne'er-do-wells" on /. (TROLL /.ers, not all) OR post on hosts offtopic.
YOU HELPED ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... (& you quit trying to make me look bad trying to "tell lies" on hosts as "ME" IN YOUR IMPERSONATIONS of me e.g. https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... as regards Intel speculative execution attack? Hosts PREVENT 'EM)
APK
P.S.=> I KNOW the 2nd to last link above's KILLING YOU - YOU ACTUALLY HELPED ME getting me to see if hosts stop more than portsmash (& Meltdown + Spectre too) & "lo & behold" - hosts WORK on 'em - U LOSE... apk
It's still an abomination.
Somehow writing your code in one language, which is then transcompiled into a different language, which is then interpreted at runtime seems like a recipe for unnecessarily introducing security issues.
#DeleteChrome
It was Microsoft's attempt, to embrace, extend and extinguish JavaScript.
JScript was like JavaScript, but incompatible. Yet dominating, due to IE dominating.
They were halfway done with the extinguish part, when Firefox started to gain power.
Looks like they are still being Microsoft, and apart from a slightly different approach, haven't changed at all. Unlike what some blackeyers around here keep repeating. (Cue the "No true Scotsman ...").
It was Microsoft's attempt, to embrace, extend and extinguish JavaScript.
No it wasn't. JScript, just like Javascript, was an implementation of the ECMAScript specification with added extensions.
JScript was like JavaScript, but incompatible.
You could just as well say that Javascript was like JScript, but incompatible. They both derived from ECMAScript and both added their own non-standard extensions.
Looks like they are still being Microsoft, and apart from a slightly different approach, haven't changed at all. Unlike what some blackeyers around here keep repeating. (Cue the "No true Scotsman ...").
I think the problem is you don't know what TypeScript is, TypeScript is a language that compiles to Javascript. If they added extensions that created non-standard Javascript then TypeScript code wouldn't run in anybody's browser, far from extinguishing Javascript it would actually extinguish TypeScript because it would be completely useless in that nobody would be able to run it. In any case why would you think MS would want to extinguish Javascript?
Im not sure what your theory here actually is but given you clearly don't know what TypeScript is and don't know the history of JScript/Javascript wrt ECMAScript it just seems like you're very very confused.
... Microsoft's TypeScript Dominating Ransomware.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Adding static typing to JavaScript would be like adding a preprocessor to C that had a proper concept of arrays and did not do pointer arithmetic. Every true C hacker "knows" that pointer arithmetic is essential for performance and would put up with it's removal for a minute.
Likewise, every true JavaScript hack knows that constraining the type of a variable is a straight jacket, that code should be free, and that TypeScript is the work of the devil.
In both cases, you are trying to make Java out of something that is not Java. Tying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
I, for one, welcome our TypeScript overlords. JavaScript continues to work its way deeper and deeper into the tech stack. It was okay playing fast and loose with types at first when the code was relatively simple and straightforward and not hard to debug and didn't cause the whole stack to fail. Not so much any more. Then there's all those JavaScript best practices. My favorite is when I'm told that the code is "self-documenting" (read - no comments, no docs), then I jump into some "self-documenting" code and I'm being fed a value whose type is not clearly defined nor its source clearly documented. Maybe if I'm lucky the default property type and even a default value is defined in the file, courtesy of yet another library. My opinion is such that JavaScript is not scaling well as it gets implemented further and further and that a lot of what I've seen called JavaScript best practices would be called sheer laziness in any other language. TypeScript relieves us of a couple of those woes.
Cool stoy bro, but in this case:
- Typescript is open source, with an Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/Microsoft/T...
- JavaScript deserves to die in a fire. And thankfully now we finally have WebAssembly.
Fascinating points in the survey results:
- 50% of the developers with Angular experience don't want to use it again.
- Front end frameworks have a 2 year hype lifespan and then get replaced with something else
- Cordova has among the highest percent of developers experienced in it which will not use it again
Business decision - How much will it cost to get decent developers in 4 years to work on a large system built in today's hot front end framework? Will any developers be available?
Programmer Bob: Hey, lets use cool new framework X, back end technology Y and data store Z
Manager Zot: Yes, lets add yet another 3 soon to be unknown technologies to that dozens we've added over the last 5 years which no one knows anything about.
Experienced the pet tools collection at 3 different companies, each struggling to support and extend systems which none of the original developers were still around to work on them.
Cordova is probably the most misunderstood framework of all times. People somehow mistake it as a front-end framework to app development.
Well, it is not.
Its purpose is to enable smartphone app develpment by JavaScript across any device that supports a webview and some form of native to JavaScript binding. That's really all it does and it is good at it.
According to the stats,
- Typescript only comes as second, E6 has about two time the number of happy users
- Typescript and Flow are the only one with a non-negligible part of UNHAPPY users (more than 5% which is 1/9 Typescript user, where most of the solutions have only about 1% unhappy users)
- it has the biggest proportion of "heard it, would like to learn"...
As far as I can see the stats, it looks like it's more E6 that dominates the Javascript environment... But with 86% of happy users, it leave very few room for improving it's numbers...
I was there, kid. ECMAScript didn't even exist back then!
There were freaking news and lawsuits over it for years, for fuck's sake!
JavaScript was invented at Netscape. Microsoft just copied it. (Embrace.)
But JScript was NOT compatible with JavaScript. (Extend.) I had to code for that shit every day. since IE dominated. (Extinguish.) I know.
ECMAScript was created later, when the ECMA wanted to make JavaScript a standard.
Since they wanted a clean and nice standard, they added things that were not yet added to JavaScript. (Partially due to backwards compatibility.)
Then, they got implemented in JavaScript, and much later, after a shitload of fighting and lawsuits hitting the news for years, also in JScript. Partially. So there'd "always" be some annoying remains, just out of childish spite.
So don't give me that rewritten history bullshit. No matter how much MS creeped up your ass, into your mind. I was literally there. Talking to those guys, sometimes even face to face. It was my day job back then.
Go Google the news from back then, if you don't believe me.
You get to know Microsoft, as soon as it comes back to bite you in the ass.
Open source never stopped Microsoft. Just look at the whole SCO case.
Or the BSD underpinnings in Windows NT.
Maybe you need to have your own experiences...
If only you'd not ruin it for us too in the process...
. . .
I agree about JS needing to die in a fire though. :D
Along with PHP, C++, any BASIC, (ba)sh-likes, XSLT, the write-only parts of Perl, and using C above the low kernel / driver level.
JScript probably was all about tying people in to Internet Explorer by implementing an almost-but-not-quite Javascript.
Typescript, on the other hand, really is just a pre-processor for Javascript that gives you 'compile-time' type checking and a bunch of new/proposed ECMAScript features - and then spits out standard Javascript code targeted at whatever version of JS/ECMAScript you want to support. Rather than locking you in to particular browsers, it levels the playing field between browsers, since you can start using bleeding-edge ECMAScript features in your source code now without requiring users to have the latest version of your favourite browser.
What you won't appreciate unless you've tried it is that the output from Typescript is not just standard JavaScript (of the version you specify) but legible Javascript - not some hyper-optimised, minified mess. They've actually avoided including a minifier/optimiser/obfuscater at the TypeScript stage - you can use one of those on the JS output if you want. If you start worrying about that MS scorpion on your back, you really can just ditch Typescript and start working directly with the JavaScript output.
Of course, if you wouldn't touch Javascript with a bargepole you probably won't want anything to do with Typescript. I'm sure that there are platform-independent zero-install options for delivering Haskell, Rust and Python apps to non-tech users out there somewhere.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Ahh the 1990s futility of wrapping html/js in a browser control and calling it a non-browser application.