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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."

1 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. TypeScript ans VSCode are an example ... by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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