Since the beginning of the lockdown, many people have been looking forward to acquire new skills. And I have seen a lot of interest in learning programming languages. I was asked by a few of my junior colleagues, interns and students on which programming language should they invest their time in.
As long as their requirement was generic application development, my advice has been mostly to learn Javascript. That might seem a little strange to many, as Javascript has been long considered as a secondary skill. This is because Javascript was mostly used to develop client side experience for web applications, and as long as you are not working in a company that has the luxury to afford a separate UI development team, Javascript was just another skill that is good to have.
[A screenshot of an application that I am working on using Javascript]
In this blog post, I would try to explain why it is no longer the case, and investing time in Javascript is rewarding than never before. Let's discuss what are the different things that you could do with Javascript.
1. Client-side development for web applications
This is the most obvious of all. Javascript has been in use as the client-side scripting language for years and has easily sidelined others such as VB script and many others.For those who are not aware of what client side scripting is, it is used to build most of that you see while using web applications (or in common language, websites). For an example, you must have noticed that an advertisement popup was displayed almost immediately after the page was loaded, this was done through a client side scripting language - which in my case was Javascript.
Javascript in its original form is increasingly not used for client side development. Rather, it is replaced with a class of frameworks called Javascript Libraries. A few popular examples would be React, Angular, Vue.js etc. which recently emerged, and legacy JS frameworks like ExtJS, Dojo etc.