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Programming Stats

Microsoft's TypeScript Dominates In 'State of JavaScript 2018' Report (stateofjs.com) 68

This week a Paris-born designer/developer (now living in Osaka) announced the results of the third annual "State of JavaScript" survey of over 20,000 JavaScript developers in 153 countries "to figure out what they're using, what they're happy with, and what they want to learn."

An anonymous reader writes: Among its findings? The number of people who have used Microsoft's TypeScript and said they would use it again has increased from 20.08% in 2016 to 46.7% in 2018, "and in some countries that ratio even went over 50%." More than 7,000 respondents indicated they liked its "robust, less error-prone code" and another 5,500 cited "elegant programming style and patterns." A blog post announcing the results declares TypeScript "the clear leader" among other syntaxes and languages that can compile to JavaScript.

Meanwhile, when it comes to frameworks, "only React has both a high satisfaction ratio and a large user base, although Vue is definitely getting there." Elsewhere the report notes Vue has already overtaken React for certain metrics such as total GitHub stars. "Angular on the other hand does boast a large user base, but its users don't seem too happy," the announcement adds, although later the report argues that Angular's poor satisfaction ratio "is probably in part due to the confusion between Angular and the older, deprecated AngularJS (previous surveys avoided this issue by featuring both as separate items)."

94% of the survey's respondents were male, and "Years of experience" for the respondents seemed to cluster in three cohorts in the demographics breakdown: 27.8% of respondents reported they had 2-5 years of experience, while 28% reported 5-10 years, and 24% reported 10-20 years.

There's a beautiful interactive graphic visualizing "connections between technologies," where a circle's outer red band is segmented based on the popularity of JavaScript libraries, while hovering over each band reveals the popularity of other libraries with its users. But while this year's results were presented on a "dark mode" web page, the survey's announcement concedes that this year's trends didn't include many surprises.

"TL;DR: things didn't change that much this year."
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Microsoft's TypeScript Dominates In 'State of JavaScript 2018' Report

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  • I've used the JS on and off since 2006. I've been through the JQueries and a few other works of frame, but only recently started looking into the TS. It feels a tiny bit like a merge of .NET and JS to me.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    You used to be able to give a HTML/CSS guy a Photoshop file and they could produce all the static content for the developer.
    Now with all these frameworks and JavaScript ecosystem these people feel overwhelmed and you end up needed someone with a technical background to do something which needs more of a visual eye

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Sunday November 25, 2018 @02:23PM (#57697670)

    ... of MS for once not screwing up open source. They've regained some karma with me. It's a long way to go but a good start. As for JS transpiled client and server-side web development there is no better way to go right now than with TypeScript and VSCode. Tooling and integration is excellent and VSCode is feature rich and really surprisingly performant.
    Both come recommended from yours truly. And it's about 25 years ago I've said something like this of an MS product.

  • Somehow writing your code in one language, which is then transcompiled into a different language, which is then interpreted at runtime seems like a recipe for unnecessarily introducing security issues.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Or possibly reducing them as the TS-to-JS compiler can actually check your code for various obvious correctness things?

      You've written a function that only works on integers, how about letting the compiler check you're only feeding integers into it?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      This isn't very different from C being compiled to Assembly, or Java/.NET to Byte Code. A lot of developers seem to be concerned with one form of transpilation, but seemingly not of the other forms that have pre-existed it.

      The only unusual step here is that JS undergoes another step via each browser implementation, and finally into machine code, where as the other languages go directly to machine code from their form.

      • Adding static typing to JavaScript would be like adding a preprocessor to C that had a proper concept of arrays and did not do pointer arithmetic. Every true C hacker "knows" that pointer arithmetic is essential for performance and would put up with it's removal for a minute.

        Likewise, every true JavaScript hack knows that constraining the type of a variable is a straight jacket, that code should be free, and that TypeScript is the work of the devil.

        In both cases, you are trying to make Java out of somethin

      • by tepples ( 727027 )

        This isn't very different from C being compiled to Assembly

        The difference is that in the case of a C program in a mainstream PC operating system on default settings, the user has the opportunity to make the choice to download and run the program or not. In the case of JavaScript in a mainstream web browser on default settings, the browser publisher and website operator have made this choice for the user.

    • seems like a recipe for unnecessarily introducing security issues.

      I thought that was the goal.

  • ... Microsoft's TypeScript Dominating Ransomware.

  • I, for one, welcome our TypeScript overlords. JavaScript continues to work its way deeper and deeper into the tech stack. It was okay playing fast and loose with types at first when the code was relatively simple and straightforward and not hard to debug and didn't cause the whole stack to fail. Not so much any more. Then there's all those JavaScript best practices. My favorite is when I'm told that the code is "self-documenting" (read - no comments, no docs), then I jump into some "self-documenting" code
  • According to the stats,
    - Typescript only comes as second, E6 has about two time the number of happy users
    - Typescript and Flow are the only one with a non-negligible part of UNHAPPY users (more than 5% which is 1/9 Typescript user, where most of the solutions have only about 1% unhappy users)
    - it has the biggest proportion of "heard it, would like to learn"...

    As far as I can see the stats, it looks like it's more E6 that dominates the Javascript environment... But with 86% of happy users, it leave very fe

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