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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."

6 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
  2. Re:JS Fail by vux984 · · Score: 2

    "This says more about what's missing in JavaScript that people want than any success for Microsoft. I guess inheritance is useful after all."

    Strong typing is the feature that javascript was missing that typescript adds, which is pretty much why TYPEscript exists.

    It dramatically improves the maintainability of code.

  3. Re:I dunno by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or possibly reducing them as the TS-to-JS compiler can actually check your code for various obvious correctness things?

    You've written a function that only works on integers, how about letting the compiler check you're only feeding integers into it?

  4. Re: 94% Male by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why don't you pseudo-male bitches stop whining about what females might do. No wonder you faggots are INCEL, GOP. God damn you actual bitches need some real victimstance in your pathetic lives.

        - Furiously typed on my iMac, at starbucks

  5. Re:A fudge on a kludge by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

    Google liked Typescript enough to switch mainstream Angular development over to it...

  6. Javascript practices by cordovaCon83 · · Score: 2

    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.