If you want to learn how to code or pick up a new programming language, now is a great time to learn JavaScript. Let me tell you why.
This year JavaScript turns 21. A lot of time has passed since NetScape hired Brendan Eich to create a programming language that would tip the scales in their favor during what we now know as the browser wars.
Even though NetScape lost, fortunately JavaScript survived (thanks to its community). Despite browser incompatibilities, it remained the language of the web.
After going more than a decade without updates (and yet people still built incredible things with it), the language got a major update in 2015 with the release of ES2015.
That’s why I think now is a great time to consider betting your professional future on learning JavaScript.
Industry Support
When Google launched Gmail and showed the world the power of JavaScript by using Ajax to avoid page reloads on new requests, the industry changed completely.
Today, companies like Netflix, Spotify, Yahoo, Medium, Platzi, Uber, and even NASA use it to build their technology platforms.
But beyond just using it, the language’s development committee (TC39) is made up of and represented by engineers from major tech companies, all working to push the language forward.
This leads us to two things:
- The language will keep growing to meet industry requirements, guided by highly qualified people.
- As more companies bet on JavaScript, the number of job openings for JavaScript developers grows every year, and this incredibly leads to higher salaries due to the demand for good programmers in the industry.
Build Whatever You Want
In its early days, JavaScript was used to create simple animations and interactions on websites. But in 2009, the nodeJS project was launched, which brought JavaScript to the back-end. This opened up huge possibilities and changed the industry.
Today we can use JavaScript for almost anything we can think of, allowing something amazing: making code reusable across platforms and thinking in a single language.
Netflix uses JavaScript to build its applications for all the devices it supports.
Whether you want to do front-end, back-end, build mobile apps, program drones, build bots, manage databases, and more.
You can learn a single language and use it across all of them.
It Gives You the Freedom to Learn and Grow
As I mentioned, the language went through a period with no new version releases. However, there were still proposals and advancements within the community, because JavaScript integrates big ideas into a single programming language.
JavaScript gives you the freedom to program with whatever paradigm you prefer. You can:
- Program with object-oriented principles, using a delegation and composition system that’s much simpler than class-based hierarchies.
- Program using the functional paradigm, since it supports closures and functions as first-class citizens, without being as strict as pure functional languages.
- Use reactive programming, which gives you the ability to work with large amounts of data efficiently.
- Work asynchronously, since it has a brilliant and easy-to-understand concurrency model, perfect for building real-time platforms.
The Community Won’t Leave You Hanging
JavaScript is one of the programming languages with the largest development communities. GitHub ranked it as the most popular programming language in 2015.
On top of that, it has the largest package manager of any programming language.
These two things are just a glimpse of how amazing its community is — and not just because of how active it is, but because it’s a community that proposes ideas and doesn’t believe in absolute truths. It always strives to do things better, following awesome principles like: divide and conquer, or keep things simple, etc.
You can search for JavaScript meetups in your city or groups that get together, and you’ll very likely find one or several.
Conclusion
Being honest with you, you’re not going to learn JavaScript in a week. It’ll probably take you more than 6 months to really understand the language and the tools needed to build amazing products.
But it’ll be totally worth it, and you’ll be on an incredible learning journey where you’ll meet very talented programmers who challenge you to become a better professional every day and to build products that impact the lives of hundreds or thousands of people.
If you’re just getting started and don’t know much English, you can check out our repository where we’ve gathered amazing resources for learning JavaScript in Spanish.