How Popular is JavaScript in 2019?
When people ask me what language they should learn, I tell them to start with JavaScript. Why? JavaScript is the standard programming language of the web, and the software you write with JavaScript will be usable by everybody.
Software ate the world, the web ate software, and JavaScript ate the web.
This is enough for me. I want to write software that anyone can use, and virtually everyone who has an internet connected device with a screen can use apps written in JavaScript.
There are lots of ways to rank programming languages. A handful of indexes dominate Google for the search term “programming languge index”. Pick your favorite. Those indexes rank JavaScript #7, #3, and #1, respectively.
No matter where it falls in your favorite ranking, JavaScript is a top contender in real-world usage. I frequently argue that it’s the most used programming language in the world. What I mean by that is that more programmers write JavaScript than any other programming language in the world. If you piled all the source code written in the last decade into piles, JavaScript would be the biggest pile.
This is reflected in the number of packages available in programming languages package repositories. JavaScript’s standard package manager has more…
