Sunday 21 May 2017

What is JavaScript?

As per Wikipedia, JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, and interpreted programming language. Alongside HTML and CSS, it is one of the three core technologies of World Wide Web content production. The majority of websites employ it and it is supported by all modern Web browsers without plug-ins. It also support object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. It has an API for working with text, arrays, dates and regular expressions, but does not include any I/O, such as networking, storage, or graphics facilities, relying for these upon the host environment in which it is embedded.
Why every programmer should learn JavaScript?

Demand - As per GitHub and StackOverflow, JavaScript is more popular than any other languages and number one computer language  till date. JavaScript's matures and things like Node.js become increasingly viable options, the demand for JavaScript programmers will continue to increase.  JavaScript already surpasses C# as rated by demand, and is surpassed only by Java.

Higher paid - JavaScript pays better than C# but still Java pays a bit better right now. But as demand for JavaScript grows, we can expect the pay to increase as well. While the demand for JavaScript is evident, it is obvious that several languages that have a smaller demand actually pay better. I suspect this is because many organizations still think of JavaScript as the language that anyone can use.  It will be a very painful lesson when they find out that "Anyone can program in JavaScript" really means, "Anyone can write crappy code in JavaScript".

JavaScript is Maturing - With the recent commitment of the standards committee to release a new JavaScript standard every year, it is clear that the amount of Syntactic Sugar that will be added on to JavaScript is going to be increasing every year for a while now.  One of the best features JavaScript is the ability to use the async and await keywords in code to eliminate callback hell.

The browsers are also continually improving how they handle JavaScript code.  In the future when browsers not only cache the JavaScript files, but cache the compiled version of the JavaScript files.  Bringing us closer to near binary speed.

JavaScript Programmers Are More Equal Than Others - Many people who call themselves JavaScript programmers, but don't know the basics. And that is today. Imagine what this is going to look like three to five years from now. And don't forget that a lot of the tooling to support profiling and memory leaks is just at its infancy. If you have those skills today, and you have marketed yourself well, you are already realizing that a lot of what I'm saying here is true.

Frameworks Are Maturing - With the new version of Angular in the works, Aurelia in the works as an alternative. Commercial products such as Scencha's EXTjs.  Node.js for server side programing. Node.js for server side programing. And others No one can say that it is too hard to develop real applications using JavaScript. Even, you could write a desktop application that ran using nothing but JavaScript.

JavaScript Runs Everywhere - JavaScript runs on every major browser on every major platform. It runs on the server side on every major operating system.  Anyone writing a web site today of any major functionality is going to need someone who knows JavaScript to write the front end.  It doesn't matter what the back end code was written in be it Java, PHP, .NET, Node.js or something else, the client side is going to need a JavaScript developer.

JavaScript is a Compiled Language - It may shock you to know that, technically, JavaScript is a compiled language.  This has two implications.  First, once the code is compiled, it is possible for it to run as fast as any other executable.  Second, it is technically possible to write tooling for JavaScript that would create a binary file that does not need to be recompiled every time the code is loaded into memory.

JavaScript will dominate, but no one will write it - Future of JavaScript is different than others. If we don't write JavaScript, who will? Transcoding robots, that’s who. We'll write our code in any of a dozen dialects and the transcoding robots will turn it into something that the browser or Node.js understands. More and more code on GitHub can't run without being "compiled" by something. The most prominent are pinky-saving dialects, such as TypeScript and CoffeeScript, that strip away much of the punctuation that bothers some programmers. These are only the beginning because clever programmers have written transcoders for languages as diverse as Cobol, Java, Lisp, and C. All of them can now run in your browser after being lovingly translated and optimized for fast delivery and parsing.

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