5 Reasons Why JavaScript is a Big Deal in 2015
JavaScript is becoming the lingua franca of programming languages. As Yad Faeq mentions in our podcast episode, there are numerous reasons this is happening.
- Compile-time support: CoffeeScript and TypeScript both allow catching of errors at compile-time, which is useful in a dynamic language like JavaScript.
- Server-side compatibility: this has been around for awhile but Node.js raises the bar on JavaScript compile time by going straight to machine code via V8, with no bytecode intermediary.
- “API economy”: JSON is the convergent RESTful protocol for IPC. Developers can rest easy that their public-facing API will not become deprecated in a sudden surge of XML popularity. Since JavaScript treats JSON as a first-class citizen, integrating with an external JSON API is easiest in a JavaScript framework.
- Light Frameworks: Express, Meteor, Backbone, Angular, React–these frameworks can be easily mixed because they were designed to be unopinionated. The switching cost between different JavaScript frameworks is lower than moving from Rails to Spring.
- Schema is unknown: a database schema can change quickly from day to day. NoSQL databases allow more agile evolution of the data model and treat JSON as a first-class citizen.
