Hola! Welcome to my blog. Today the topic of discussion is Why Javascript is the king of all programming languages? Let's dive into it...

Javascript was the first programming language I chose for my career because I wanted to become a MERN stack developer. As every web developer starts his/her career with HTML & CSS, I too learned them. But Javascript was a true challenge for me as it was my first language to learn and a high-level language.

JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich in 1995. It was developed for Netscape 2 and became the ECMA-262 standard in 1997. After Netscape handed JavaScript over to ECMA, the Mozilla foundation continued to develop JavaScript for the Firefox browser.

Javascript may not be favorable for beginners because concepts are different from another programming language due it its prototypical behavior.

Today Javascript is the most used existing programming language on the planet because of its performance and omnipresence. A Javascript developer can be a Web Developer, App Developer, A ML Expert, Desktop Applications developer and what not...

Most people use Python for automating tasks like Machine Learning due to the availability of modules and packages, but Javascript is evolving too in the field of automation. All thanks to Tensorflow.js

The earlier situation of Javascript was very different, "Javascript is for Losers" was the tag given to the Javascript developer because it was non-performant, But the tables have been changed now in 10 years. Javascript is the king now!

Reasons for Javascript's success:-

1) Existence of a V8 Engine:-

V8 is the Javascript Engine. Huh? Javascript Engine what's that? A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. V8 is Google’s open-source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly JIT engine, written in C++. It is used in Chrome and in Node.js, among others. V8 can run standalone or can be embedded into any C++ application. V8 optimizes Javascript code in the following ways:-
- Garbage Collection
- Compilation to machine code
- Inline caching
- Pointer compression
- and many high-level optimizations.

If you are more curious, you can always visit the V8 blog.

2) Community

The Javascript community is very vast and growing day by day. It has the most experienced developers all around the world giving their contributions which make the best community.

You can fire up a browser (found on 100% of personal computers), open the console, and you'll find a JS engine waiting for you to run code! This was never the case with any other programming languages of such complexity.

Also, there are package management tools like npm and yarn, which helps to download packages developed by other developers like us and use them in our application.

"Any app that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

If you are stuck over a problem you can always get solutions on sites like stack overflow.

3) Omnipresence

Javascript is everywhere. A Javascript developer can be

1. Front end (Browsers)
2. Back end (Node, Deno)
3. Android/iOS (React Native, NativeScript, etc.)
4. Desktop (Electron)
5. Hybrid (Ionic)

With its extreme level of omnipresence, one can switch careers easily by learning the framework of the library because the core is the same.

4) Exciting Features and Advancements

JavaScript standards are led by the ECMA-262 TC39 community, and wow are these people fast! ECMAScript releases a new standard of JavaScript every single year. You as a developer can even request that new features be added to the language.

5) Javascript is fast and scalable

Yeah Yeah okay, no one can beat C++ / Rust but Javascript is fast. V8 can generate highly optimized code by monitoring how your code executes, delaying the bits of execution that are not used, and optimizing the code segments which are used over and over. V8 upgrades will make Javascript faster and more scalable.

JavaScript (Node) is highly scalable (with supersets like TypeScript). Running on a single-threaded architecture, people often criticize Node for its lack of threading environment, but the reality is it doesn't matter a lot.

JavaScript leads the asynchronous event-driven programming model of the industry and does not need threads to scale.

Conclusion

Javascript is for heroes now. Frameworks and Libraries like React, Angular, and Vue are making Javascript more reachable to users and aspirants learning to code. JavaScript is here to stay and rule the industry this decade. Do you agree? Proud to be a Javascript Developer!

Happy Coding! Happy Life!

Regards,

Devesh Korde