[michaelmior]

> JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-End developers are more likely to use it than any other language.

I'm not convinced this conclusion applies to the software development community as a whole. s/earth/Stack Overflow/

[baldfat]

I read it as: "Man, I better get over my hatred of JavaScript." (Started when building front ends to databases in 1999. Haven't really looked back and that is 100% my fault.

[p4wnc6]

I disagree. I'd much rather be forced to learn an entirely new profession and leave coding all together than to be required to write Javascript professionally.

One thing this survey doesn't really touch on is the way the rise of Javascript is related to a fall in software quality. We write a lot more code now. More people write code. And a lot of that code sucks and it's a shame someone foolishly considers it productive labor output. And a lot of that code, the sucky stuff, is Javascript.

Refusal to use Javascript is still a signal of a smart and quality-focused developer. Similar to refusal to use Mongo.

I wish the SO survey didn't just measure what tech is popular among employers or what tech is paid well. Employers are notorious for incorrectly investing in the wrong tech, shoehorning things in, and declaring 'victory' when they deploy a bug-ridden, 1-star app or something. That kind of situation, which is common, should be down-weighted in the survey results, if only it were easier to collect that data.

[m90]

Cool story, bro, spread the gospel. Better keep people from easy access to programming and enjoy the beautiful software we had in the 90ies.

[p4wnc6]

The same phenomena existed in the 90s. Enterprise and corporate bureaucracy will always be the main driver in terms of which skill sets appear most in-demand. They have been since the dawn of computing.

The modern misguided infatuation with Javascript is just another boring chapter in the same repeated story. In 15 years it will be something else.

My point isn't to convince anyone of anything. Indeed, most people who just want a job and just don't care will simply comply with whatever is popularized by enterprise bureaucracy.

But thoughtful people ought to remember there's no need for anxiety. Great developers survived the 90s and made lots of money without ever writing a single line of Java or enterprise C++. Great developers survived the 00's and made a lot of money without ever writing a line of enterprise C# or even ever opening Visual Studio.

And great developers will survive the 2010s and 2020s and make a lot of money without ever writing a line of Javascript.

[manyxcxi]

So... If one was a great developer through the 90s to today and didn't write C++, C#, Java, or a line of JavaScript, what the hell were they writing? PHP? Perl?

Great developers are great because they love what they do, they're critical thinkers, and they've got an ability to find creative solutions to problems. Great developers are not great because they hate 'the man' and refuse to write code in the languages put forth by 'the bureaucracy'.

Bureaucrats didn't invent any of these languages or technologies. Developers (some of them great) did. You know who guides technology platforms in companies? The developers and the software architects. If Java and C# couldn't get the job done well for writing services and applications, nobody would use them.

If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else.

People that stand on the sidelines bitching about how GREAT PEOPLE don't do that without joining the fray and making it great to work with them often get left behind and forgotten.

Help make it better or get out of the way, but it's not a conspiracy by Big Company bureaucrats to trick us into creating the most engaging applications deployed to the most users easier than we've ever had it.

[p4wnc6]

> If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else.

This is circular: "Because we use the thing, it's the best. If it weren't the best, we wouldn't use it. We use it because it's the best."

Companies use non-best things all the time, even when the better options are cheaper, easier, faster, safer, etc. Political control, gate keeping, nepotism, kickbacks, drumming up showy re-orgs and migrations and initiatives for short-term executive bonus optimization ... there are endless reasons why executives and management couldn't care less what "the best" solutions look like and will use unequivocally crap solutions, solutions that are demonstrably wasteful and inefficient, if it gets them their short term bonus or promotion, or whatever.

> Help make it better or get out of the way...

Complaining is perhaps the most useful tool there is for effecting positive social change. It's not only helpful, but necessary and vital that we keep whining incessantly about how unreasonably poor a tool Javascript is, and how most of the work people choose to do with it or choose to invest in is clouded by mistaken impressions about the usefulness of that work.

Most of what we have done to the "biggest distribution platform in history" is to utterly destroy the value it held, to make it a cumbersome, psychologically manipulative stream of noise that, while still providing value, doesn't provide nearly as much value as it could if we just simply stopped fucking it up with poor web development priorities.

It seems we won't rest until there's an ad tagged to every single transmitted bit. And we can't slow down at all, lest short term bonuses be lost, so we have to evolve our way to every-bit-an-ad using whatever bad tools there are now (Javascript) as opposed to stepping back a bit to think critically about what we're doing, and what good tools would be to actually solve the problems we should solve.

Instead, libertarian brogrammer founders and VCs just spew Randian nonsense that no, this is the market economics, and if every-bit-an-ad via bad Javascript is what makes money, then it must be what the world at large wants. Ugh...

[douche]

I would suspect that many of the grunt Javascript jobs would have been grunt VB6 jobs 20 years ago.

[var_explained]

It's also the most common language on GitHub in terms of both # of repositories and total pushes: http://githut.info/. Why is it hard to believe?

[_ea1k]

Well, anyone who has ever written a webpage with a single script has used it.

I suspect that accounts for the overwhelming majority of developers now. I doubt that it means that majority is also writing the majority of their code in it.

[wyldfire]

I think it might actually be the case. It's a testament to how valuable it is to have a ubiquitous platform (especially one that's fairly uniform) on which to run your software.

But, sure, SO is extrapolating here.