It was the first years of the modern web. People were getting sick of waiting minutes for their connection to transfer the 8 bits of data telling them “Sorry, your password must contain an & or a %. Please try again.” They wanted more instantaneous feedback. Something that felt more like a desktop application.
Then finally on a rainy night in May of 1995, the great champion was born. His father, Brendan Eich, named him JavaScript after his successful grandfather Java.
(Karl Benz,the founder of Mercedes-Benz patent, is considered the father of the first practical motorcar, and JavaScript is the main engine of all browsers. This is what Brendan would look like if we called him the Benz of the web ?)
JavaScript: Rise of an empire
When JavaScript came into the world, no one was thinking it would be very popular like it is today. JavaScript was a true time saver because of its browser-side validations. But what happened that caused JavaScript to grow so fast?
Before I learn JavaScript, I used to write programs in the VB6 language. But VB6 wasn’t independent. It needed its own platform to run. One of the main reasons that JavaScript is so popular is that almost all devices have a browser. In short: JavaScript won’t limit you to a platform or type of device. You can run it on basically everything.
JavaScript’s progress and popularity is not a secret, but below you can see how JavaScript compares favorably with some other languages.
There are more contents on the web for JavaScript:
Search engines show the number of found results below their search; here is the search result for Java and JavaScript.
There are more people who are learning it:
Stack Overflow tags and the number of questions that were asked for any tag, it can show us the number of people who are learning the tag which is a technology; Stack Overflow tags are also a good way to check how a technology is growing and its popularity.
The most popular language on GitHub:
According to GitHub, JavaScript is the most popular language of GitHub followed by Java, Ruby and PHP.
JavaScript is already the most popular but it is still growing fast
Stack Overflow runs a survey every year, and this year’s survey result is very interesting and there are good things to learn from it. The picture below from the survey result shows that JavaScript is growing faster than before.
JavaScript is still misunderstood
All programming languages have their own rules, syntaxes and concepts, and each of them were made to be perfect in something, and none of them are completely perfect, we should not expect a programming language to be jack of all trades and master of none. That’s the reason many projects should chose different programming languages to bring better performance for each parts of their software.
It’s fair to say that JavaScript does not have some concepts that other programming languages have but it might come back to language design goals. One of the currently recognized problems with JavaScript is a lack of static typings that might cause problems in larger applications. That is why elegant TypeScript was created.
JavaScript was never really engineered to write large applications, it was in fact invented in about 3 weeks, in the mid 90s as a quick response to Java…, For Brendan Eich build it in 3 weeks and for having only 3 weeks, he actually did a fantasticjob, JavaScript was perhaps intended for a 100 or maybe up to a 1,000 lines of code, and now with regularity people are building 100,000 line apps, if not million lines apps. —Anders Hejlsberg, known for TypeScript, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and lead architect of C# (source: this video, time: 01:20)
Without a doubt, JavaScript owes its progress to browsers and their support of good things such as responsive web design, WebGL, WebRTC and lots of more cool things that made JavaScript more useful. Nowadays, developers are using JavaScript for game development, data visualization, mobile applications, back-end development and other fun things as well.
Motivated to learn JavaScript or being a better JavaScript developer? Let’s get started.
Let’s say you already know some JavaScript or you’re a beginner. Don’t waste time and jump into your preferred IDE and start writing the codes you want.
The fastest way to learn is learn while doing, but there is a problem with this method. There are some tricks you don’t know or you never heard of them but you’re writing your codes without knowing them and it’s hard to learn those rules or tricks without reading them somewhere. You already know you can define a variable by using the var keyword, but maybe you did not know that if you don’t use the var keyword, the variable will be global regardless of its defined place.
You will eventually learn what you need to know but that is doing it the hard way. Indeed, one of the best places you can learn while doing isfreeCodeCamp, You can work through freeCodeCamp’s self-paced coding challenges, build projects, and earn certificates. it’s like diving into code but still knowing what you’re doing and learning tricks and rules in a fast and effective way.
The problem with learning JavaScript
There are many technologies and libraries for JavaScript that make it feel scary for beginners. There are some famous names that maybe you have never used and you hear about them constantly.
Some people think “What’s this Babel thing everyone is talking about. All the famous open-source projects are using it!” Or, “Wait — should I use Browserify orWebpack? Where did Gulp and Grunt came from? Ahhh, another new library or framework introduced last week! I can’t learn them all ?”
Yes, you can’t and you should not learn them all immediately. Those technologies, frameworks and libraries exist to help you work smarter, faster and easier. When you find something interesting that is worthwhile to use on your project or is an answer to one of your needs, then you should go ahead and learn it with a beautiful smile on your face while remembering the English proverb “necessity is the mother of invention.”
“I’d encourage folks to remember we’re all in the same boat and our tools are here to help us. If they’re not doing that, we should get them out of the way.” — Addy Osmani (Link to his story)
Finally, I would like to thank Grammarly because of their perfect tool, which let me write an article in English, even though I'm not a native English speaker. Try it even if you're a native English speaker