What Programming Language to Learn in 2021
It’s complicated but pretty straightforward at the same time.
In my book a good programming language has to have a certain set of attributes it should be versatile, performant, and scalable in real-world scenarios, but the choice of the mainstream or debate in some go to conference should not be the deciding factor.
Landing a job in 2021 with the pandemic, depending on the region you fall in may either be easy for you or difficult than ever to onboard with remote hiring being a norm in most of the place, a company if they expect you to have mastery over a language that is not that mainstream or even if it is difficult to onboard and has a steep learning curve may be problematic to you as a beginner.
The other problem being, most of the technologies taught in a normal school are very low level or do not have any real-world practical use case, at least in the world's part I have attended school.
So if you are going to invest your time in learning or polishing something practical, why don’t strive for something which has a place for almost all sort of use-cases and has a thriving community and real-world examples.
If you have guessed it by now I am talking about Javascript.
Javascript of time in the mid 90’s was just the programming language of the web and almost everyone was using PHP, enterprise java, or some other thing to build their raw servers. Now the mindset of a startup is different they want things to roll out as fast as possible along with that they want to support all different sort of platforms to widen the consumer audience.
All platform that Javascript supports,
1. Web development:
Here the competition does not exist if you are talking about the frontend, you get to work with a lot of fancy technologies as well when working with Javascript. There does not even exist a close second to render your app in the Web view you have all the technologies like web assembly and people trying python, Flutter 2.0 supports all platforms something like that to make a web view all those things are good for testing out stuff but have no real-world use and even if you decide to go that route the community is pretty immature so too say and you may end up in a rut.
For the API part of it the game is quite different as compared to mentioned prior and Node.js the server env based on Chrome V8 engine that now supports is quite new as compared to some languages mentioned in the earlier part of the article, but because you can write Javascript on servers, the popularity has increased fold’s. And the same concepts that apply to your front-end syntax other than some pretty straightforward differences have immensely made it a popular technology and loved by the community.
2. Mobile Development:
Cross-platform is a trend and I see a lot of articles where people claim flutter will kill the Javascript alternative React native.
I agree to disagree the community is getting strong every day, Along with that most of the companies cannot afford to have a mobile dev team to start their business, or you as a guy wanting to start up your own business you have little choice unless you are the lucky few to have some sort of money plant homegrown or investment to say. And if we go by the theory that if some technology renders 1000 times faster just to throw a number or is very developer-friendly PHP should be long dead as the inventor himself dislikes certain traits of technology.
I have seen companies use both React and React native and share a major part of the hooks and state management in their code base and get away easily with that keeping only the View layer separate as both differ in that.
Other than that you have ionic as well which works with Angular and other JS-supported ways to develop your app as well.
3. Desktop Application Development:
Here also you might be surprised if not actively part of the Javascript world, some of your are favorite apps have a portion of JS or either done entirely in JS. Example VS CODE my favorite editor is powered by Electron. The Desktop application of WhatsApp is also using Electron. Electron uses Chromium and Node.js so you can build your app with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So if you can build a web app you can build a Desktop app as well.
4. Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence:
JavaScript community was lacking in this forte and we had to fall back to python or R some other language, now this is also possible with Javascript. You have a powerful tool Tensorflow.js sure it may not be as robust as working with Tensorflow with python but at least now you have remotely something closer to what was practically possible only using certain tools and environments.
TL;DR
In short, anything that you can think of you can most probably do that with Javascript, this offers you vast opportunities in all real-world business and makes it easier for you to land a job.
Sure no tool is perfect and should be only part of the arsenal you should not have a dependency on any technology and fall back to basics and always keep learning something new. Javascript has some weird problems also but if you have even basic hands-on practice, you will find your way around.
Don’t limit yourself and always be on the hunt to learn something new
Happy Coding and learning…
