Why you should learn JavaScript?

JavaScript is undoubtedly one of the most popular languages and it adapts with great ease to various use cases.

In this article, we’ll explain some reasons why you should consider learning and mastering JavaScript this year.

1. The most popular technology

JavaScript is the most popular programming language today for eighth consecutive year. This is shown by the results recently published by Stack Overflow.

JavaScript has maintained this popularity largely thanks to frameworks and libraries that are constantly being added to the ecosystem.

Pay attention to the animation shown above to understand how JavaScript has maintained its strength over the past years.

2. Essential language for Front-End

If you have the idea of developing a web application, whether for your personal page, for a business, a client or a company. You will most likely need to use JavaScript.

These applications generally run on the client(browser) side and are therefore called front-end development.

3. JavaScript ecosystem

JavaScript goes much further than a programming language. In recent years, a complete ecosystem has been formed for the development of applications around this language.

As JavaScript implements ECMAScript, the language is constantly evolving and new features are added that will allow you to write less code.

For example, it is already possible to handle numeric values greater than 2 ^ 53 - 1, which is the largest number that JavaScript can reliably handle with the primitive type Number. Try the following code blocks in your browser console to verify it:

let myNumber = Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER; // 2^53 - 1
console.log(myNumber);
console.log(myNumber + 1);
console.log(myNumber + 2); // Inconsistency

let bigInt = 9007199254740991n;
console.log(bigInt);
console.log(bigInt + 1n);
console.log(bigInt + 2n);
bigInt = 2n ** 100n; // 2^100: This is impossible with Number!
console.log(bigInt);

4. Fast Application development

With JavaScript it is possible to develop a basic application with very few lines of code. It is one of the reasons why back-end development and full-stack development have also become popular according to [Stack Overflow] (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-roles).

These results show the 5 most important roles for developers today. What are the good news? You can work on any of them using JavaScript!

5. Libraries and Frameworks

Today we can find an incredible number of libraries and frameworks for JavaScript, which allow us to develop applications with many features for the web: interactive applications, real-time applications, streaming applications for audio and video, data visualization(see the charts of this article), etc.

In addition to these top JavaScript libraries and frameworks, the possibilities are getting wider:

• For the Web: Angular, React, Vue.js, Svelte
• For the mobile development: NativeScript, Ionic, React Native
• Desktop Applications: Electron
• For Back-end development: Node.js, Express.js, NestJS

How to learn JavaScript?

So, are you convinced to become a developer with more opportunities and learn JavaScript?

The best way to start with this language is to practice. You can test your code in a simple way using the console of your browser (Google Chrome or Firefox, for example).

And since you got here, some cookies to share with you:

Thanks for reading!
— Luis Aviles