Gravitating JavaScript
Pixelating the Trends
Ever wondered why JavaScript is the most used language in all over Github, the most popular language on the StackOverflow and, top technology for software development? Through this blog, I’ll try to justify the hype.
But what is JavaScript?
JavaScript is a high-level programming language, meaning it is close to our common English. Traditionally, JavaScript was built for front-end web development along with HTML and CSS to make web pages interactive. To develop a parallel understanding, HTML can be thought of as the noun, CSS as the adjective and, JavaScript as the verb of a website. Hence, the combination of these three gives a proper structure to a web page. Almost every website uses it for the client-side or the front end behavior of the website. The majority of web browsers, like Google Chrome’s V8 engine, have dedicated JavaScript engines to execute it. Every beautiful website out there is due to JavaScript.When writing web pages and apps, one of the most common things you’ll want to do is manipulate the document structure in some way. This is usually done by using the Document Object Model (DOM). jQuery, a JavaScript library makes this process simpler.
What makes it so appealing?
The success of any programming language depends on the community of the developers, versatility and, portability of the language. To start with, JavaScript is a very user-friendly language, meaning that it has very easy to understand syntax. What gives JavaScript a major boost is the great developer community it has managed to develop over the years. Over 900k members on the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/ !!. Most of the other languages do not have even half of the number of members. With such a vast community, it makes the learning process for a developer very easy.
What makes JavaScript #1
Above all, what sets apart JavaScript from other languages is its versatility. As a developer, I would want to master one programming language that offers a wide domain of applications. JavaScript has been successful in doing so by providing many frameworks and libraries. As mentioned earlier, JavaScript engines were used in web browsers only, but now they can be embedded into the servers through Node.js which is, using JavaScript on the server-side scripting. This versatility led to the notion of “JavaScript everywhere”. Node.js represents the best paradigm of the notion by unifying the server-side and client-side coding around the single programming language. Recently they have released Tensorflow.js which incorporates machine learning into web development. It has never been simpler to use machine learning models in your web applications.
Some of the most powerful frameworks of JavaScript:
React: Developed by Facebook, the React framework has earned a lot of popularity within a short period. It is used to develop and operate the dynamic User Interface of the web pages with high incoming traffic. It makes the use of a virtual DOM, and hence, the integration of the same with any application is more straightforward.
Node: JavaScript runtime environment for server-side coding. The framework is capable of driving asynchronous I/O with its event-driven architecture.
Angular: It is used for the development of the SPAs (Single Page Applications). It is one of the most powerful, efficient, and open-source library operated by Google.
JavaScript Vs rest of the world
Arguably many programming languages such as python provide many frameworks to perform the same tasks. One of the frameworks that python provides for server-side coding is Django. There’s always this hot debate going on over Node.js Vs Django. I started backend development in Node.js and then explored Django a bit. I might be little bias towards Node because I am not a huge fan of python but here’s what facts have to say :
No doubt python makes it easier to learn the process, however, I prefer Node over Django because of the same notion, “JavaScript everywhere” and adding to that I am guaranteed high performance.
Getting Started with JavaScript
If you want to learn JavaScript, you should start with HTML and CSS. I started with the “Complete Web Developer Bootcamp” by Colt Steele on Udemy which is a very structured course and a great place to start as well. Many free online resources are available, I highly recommend going through the following:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
Let’s go through some statistics,
Undoubtedly and unsurprisingly, JavaScript retains its crown for being the top technology for software development and most used programming language on Github! Why I love using JavaScript is because it not only provides a lot of frameworks and libraries but also ensures the quality of the performance of the application. With emerging trends, we have witnessed the growth of JavaScript and this growth is pretty justified due to its adaptability and versatility.
