Visualforce has been exist for many years within Salesforce platform, and Javascript even longer exist and keep growing and being popular among developers. According to Wikipedia, JavaScript is more than 21 years old programming language.

#Lightning Tips for Visualforce Devs!

So Lighting is no longer a new things in Salesforce, it come with new UI and features, although some features in Classic is not yet available in Lightning, read here as of Winter 17 release https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter16/release-notes/lex_gaps_limitations.htm

It is much easier to learn how to code in Salesforce platform nowadays, with thousands of resources available online. But here is the step by step for you to get started: