Over the past couple of years the language that has really made an impression over the others has been JavaScript. We can find clues of its burst of popularity everywhere; GitHub's most famous and HackerNews' most discussed language. It's obvious JavaScript has made an impact on how we develop and interact with websites.
But why? Why are all these cool things coming out from this particularly annoying little scripting language? Why is everyone so excited about it? Frankly, I don't think it's part of the language's syntax - as your Computer Scientist teacher in college might have told you, a programming language is just a tool that we use to perform a task, and the syntax is just a way to let us perform that task and it shouldn't get in our way. Well, then it must be something else, right? Particularly for JavaScript, I would say its popularity is mostly due to the fact that it's embedded in the browser, which is by far the most used application on a personal computer.
This little but important fact leads to an enormous amount of information related to the language being constantly shared over the internet. Think of blogs, code snippets, questions, tutorials etc. All this makes a language extremely popular. The amount of data on the internet related to a particular language is also proportionally related to the amount of programmers you'll find that know how to use that language. This leads to more developers and therefore more innovation.
There you go, the secret JavaScript ingredient is the casual existence of the Web Browser on peoples computers that made interpreting scripts possible without the overhead of installing compilers or IDEs.
However, even with this extreme jump in popularity, JavaScript was always referred to as a client-side language or frontend language, it took a while before it entered the main-stream. Web-development has always been a matter of developing with JavaScript on the client-side and then using some other language on the server. This methodology is really inconsistent to me, but apparently people are still accustomed to it.
Of course I'm not saying that people should drop their Java/PHP/Python environment - technologies and languages should be used wherever they are best fit - I'm saying that people should consider trying out JavaScript on the server. If you think about it, you end up with a code-base written in one language; this points to all sorts of maintainability improvements on the overall project.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Will your next project use JavaScript on the server or will you use the same old PHP framework? Try and innovate, use different things and different languages, all the time. Don't get stuck with a boring Java framework.
But why? Why are all these cool things coming out from this particularly annoying little scripting language? Why is everyone so excited about it? Frankly, I don't think it's part of the language's syntax - as your Computer Scientist teacher in college might have told you, a programming language is just a tool that we use to perform a task, and the syntax is just a way to let us perform that task and it shouldn't get in our way. Well, then it must be something else, right? Particularly for JavaScript, I would say its popularity is mostly due to the fact that it's embedded in the browser, which is by far the most used application on a personal computer.
This little but important fact leads to an enormous amount of information related to the language being constantly shared over the internet. Think of blogs, code snippets, questions, tutorials etc. All this makes a language extremely popular. The amount of data on the internet related to a particular language is also proportionally related to the amount of programmers you'll find that know how to use that language. This leads to more developers and therefore more innovation.
There you go, the secret JavaScript ingredient is the casual existence of the Web Browser on peoples computers that made interpreting scripts possible without the overhead of installing compilers or IDEs.
However, even with this extreme jump in popularity, JavaScript was always referred to as a client-side language or frontend language, it took a while before it entered the main-stream. Web-development has always been a matter of developing with JavaScript on the client-side and then using some other language on the server. This methodology is really inconsistent to me, but apparently people are still accustomed to it.
Of course I'm not saying that people should drop their Java/PHP/Python environment - technologies and languages should be used wherever they are best fit - I'm saying that people should consider trying out JavaScript on the server. If you think about it, you end up with a code-base written in one language; this points to all sorts of maintainability improvements on the overall project.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Will your next project use JavaScript on the server or will you use the same old PHP framework? Try and innovate, use different things and different languages, all the time. Don't get stuck with a boring Java framework.