Javascript more than just a language

The language that makes your website alive.

As we all have heard at least once that HTML is the skeleton of a website CSS is the body and javascript makes a website work. The Js is the language of the browser and the browser is the one that compiles the code of HTML CSS and js combined to make a complete website.

Common Characteristics of Js:

Light-weighted: Js does not need any environmental setup or interpreter to interpret the code this language can be run in the browser itself.

Object-based scripting language: one of a feature that makes js a special scripting language is it can work on object-based scripting unlike to other scripting languages. in simple words it OOP based scripting language

Interpreter-based language: This language is not complied it is an interpreted language it converts the code to machine-level language line by line that's why it is known as an interpreted language.

inbuilt functions: It has a wide range of inbuilt functions that solve most of the day to day challenges faced by any programmers

client-side technology: client-side programming language means when you open the website then the code is interpreted which makes it special from other languages

Scripting language: It is one of the most popular scripting languages in the world. almost every programmer knows js which shows the popularity of this language.Also, it creates a script inside the HTML code means helps to create an embedded code

JavaScript Usage by Industry

We’re continuing our analysis of the results of last winter’s JavaScript Ecosystem Survey, a survey of over 16,000 developers conducted by npm in collaboration with the Node.JS Foundation and the JS Foundation. Our second topic is How JavaScript is used across industries — and, more specifically, how different industries use certain JavaScript tools, frameworks, and practices. To read more about the methodology behind this survey, click here.

We asked about what industry our respondents worked in. 45% of users answered “tech”, revealing an underlying ambiguity in our question. For instance, if you work at Google, do you work at a tech company or an advertising company? What about at Microsoft, which many consider a tech company, but also has advertising and even hardware manufacturing arms? Next time, we’ll ask for more detailed information about industry concentrations.

“We asked about what industry our respondents worked in. The most common answer was “tech” at 45%”

Despite this, we still gathered some good data about how use of JavaScript varies by industry. The top industries were:

• finance: 7%
• advertising and marketing: 5%
• education: 5%
• entertainment: 5%
• business support and logistics: 4%
• healthcare: 4%
• retail: 3%
• government: 2%
• manufacturing: 2%

There were meaningful differences across industries in how and why people use JavaScript. There were also some clear commonalities, not all of which we’re going to mention. But from a statistician’s point of view, the questions where all the industries answered very similarly are useful because it indicates the differences in other questions are “real” and not just random variation.

With 16,000 responses, even the single-digit groups per industry constituted enough data to make meaningful conclusions. We discarded answers from industries with less than 2% responses (i.e. less than 300 individual responses).

JavaScript tools

Manufacturing across the board uses less of everything — only 51% of manufacturing respondents say they use a testing framework, compared to 75% in finance.

The explanation for this may lie in the answer to another question; “Where does the JavaScript you write run?” 15% of manufacturing developers say their code runs on embedded devices which is twice as much as any other industry. Embedded platforms often have intrinsic transpilers for JS, so you do not need to use your own and have no need for browser-specific optimizations that most of these tools provide.

“Manufacturing across the board uses less of everything — only 51% of manufacturing respondents say they use a testing framework, compared to 75% in finance.”

Put another way: hardware isn’t a browser. This view of manufacturing respondents is backed up by another question, in which 31% of manufacturing respondents say their code is put to use in IoT (Internet of Things). No other industry gets above double digits for that answer. This makes manufacturing an interesting set of answers across the board, as we’ll see.

Finance, on the other hand, uses everything the most. They are the most likely to use a bundler, second-most likely to use a linter (after healthcare), most likely to test, second-most likely to use a web framework (after retail), most likely to use a transpiler, and second-most likely to use a CSS preprocessor (after advertising). Finance just does all the things.

JavaScript frameworks

Angular was a fairly popular choice across all industries, but strongest in finance. Developers in entertainment were the least likely to use Angular, their strongest preference being for React (65%).

React was the most popular framework in the survey overall, though with strong variations by industry. As mentioned, 65% of developers in entertainment chose it, but that fell to 46% in government and 38% in manufacturing. Manufacturing’s strongest choice for a framework was jQuery (52%), suggesting the industry is a late adopter. The government also had jQuery as its top pick at 52%.

Around 20% of developers in most industries reported using Vue, though it was notably more popular in advertising, with 34% of developers reporting it there.

Conclusions

There were some fascinating differences across the industries. The advertising and entertainment industries often found themselves paired together in terms of practices. Finance was cautious and security-focused. Government and manufacturing were mostly on the opposite end of that scale, with lower reported use of best practices and modern tooling. Whether you’re in these industries or building products for developers in these industries, we hope these results help you get a better sense of the broader universe of JavaScript developers.