In the 1990s, when the Web boomed with public use, technology companies struggled to create the market’s most efficient web browser. It triggered the first “browser battle” involving Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and NetScape (NetScape Navigator) to achieve prevalence in web browser usage.

What Is JavaScript Used For?

Answer this question isn’t that simple. Along with interactive web elements, a strong knowledge of JavaScript will allow you to create a lot of things:

Games

You may want to consider using your knowledge of JavaScript to build your browser-based games. While there are drawbacks around the sophistication of browser-based games, when it comes to development JavaScript is as strong as any other language.

Mobile Apps

Although the idea is to develop mobile applications in a specific operating system language such as Swift (iOS) or Java, Kotlin (Android), there is nothing that stands in the way of creating applications with JavaScript. The implementation of frameworks such as the Phone gap and React Native made it possible to create mobile applications for multiple operating systems using the same code.

Web & Server Apps

The creation of new libraries and frameworks is allowing web developers to build many back-end programs with JavaScript. Including web applications and server applications. Node.js is just one of several examples I could cite here. JavaScript is becoming as essential to the back-end web developers as it is to the front-end developers.

Why is JavaScript so important?

While JavaScript has long been the language of browsers, it hasn’t been so long since it gained (almost) universal recognition from the community of developers.

More than ten years later, though, we are here and JavaScript is more important and popular than ever.

I mean they’re everywhere. If you’re a developer, trying to find a way to work without JavaScript is practically impossible.

One of the largest and most comprehensive surveys created by Stack Overflow every year shows all this popularity. In 2019, out of 87,354 developers, 67.8% chose JS as the most popular language. And there’s nothing to indicate that it’s going to decline this year. And also the Debug Everything’s survey showed the same results.

What is JavaScript benefits

Faster User Experience

The execution of logic on the client-side brings a better user experience. The need for server calls is abstracted with the code running directly in the browser. The fact that the JS is asynchronous even with the presence of a server means that it can communicate with the server in the background without interrupting user interaction occurring on the frontend.

Better Responsive Design

JavaScript is behind all good web design. Developers need to adapt the design through different browsers and computers. But, fortunately, we can do that by integrating HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript in just one source code and adapting only what we need.

User Interactivity

JavaScript has introduced user interface interactivity to the web since its inception. Today it is doing the same for all types of applications, helping to develop the most engaging UX. Today frameworks like Vue.js take transitions and animations to the next level.

In the tech world, the future holds many things that will inevitably affect frontend growth, such as Artificial Intelligence or the Internet-of-Things. JavaScript must adjust to those new realities. My thoughts are, JavaScript will remain popular for a while, and we will have more and more tools and technologies to work with.