The Buzz...

JavaScript seems to be the buzz word in web development now a days. The language has become very popular over the past couple of years, that you can't really get away from it even if you wanted to. Most, if not all, major backend technologies have implemented some form or another of the language into their boilerplate front end code.

There is literaly a sea of JavaScript libraries out there today. From jQuery to coffee script there are to many to count or list. I would suspect that a search on GitHub would show that JavaScript is one of, if not, the most used language out there today. 2013 Github Stats

So why has JavaScript gone crazy? The language isn't young. In fact it was created in just about 10 days back in 1995 by Brendan Eich. The language was slow to catch on and didn't start to become main stream until the latter half of the last decade(2007ish).

So what changed? There are many opinions but one of the prevailing opinions is AJAX. The advent of AJAX allowed JavaScript to asynchronously update HTML pages and it was this one little thing that helped JavaScript take off.

There is of course more to it than just that. Googles work on their updated version of JavaScript improved speed and performance 10 fold. All the major browsers adopted it. But AJAX is pointed to as a major reason it was adopted so heavily.

The Good...

JavaScript popularity has some key points. Taken from this Quora article

• It's easy to learn
• Hundreds, if not, thousands of libraries
• Speed: Fast and off loads load from server to client
• JSON/AJAX
• All major browsers support it
• Node.js

The list goes on but these are some of the bigger ones. So now that we've seen some positives to the languages, lets take a look at some of the draw backs.

The language is old and it hasn't changed much since 1995. The last notable update was in 2008. There is talk of another major release soon but most people don't see it happening until later in this decade. This lack of progress in the language has turned many off while it also has driven development of JavaScript libraries such as Cofee script that attempt to make up for some of the languages short comings.

The Bad...

Here is a list of some of those short comings.

• Not OOP. At least not truly
• Poor documentation on JavaScript libraries
• No Syntactic Sugar
• No major progress in the language

The Conclusion

To sum JavaScript up, it's not going anywhere and to most, it's positives far out way it's negatives. I personaly love all of the libraries available as well as the visual prototyping abilities of JavaScript. Being a visual person, I get a lot out of the quick development process that JavaScript provides.