As the companies I work(ed) for evolve from JS => jQuery => Backbone.JS => Backbone.JS + Marionette => EmberJS, so does my skill have to evolve. I also have to write some JS code on top of PhantomJS + CasperJS (not for automation testing but instead for performance monitoring) to support enterprise product at the moment.
I used to hate JS with passion but now after seeing Chromebook, Chrome Apps, NodeJS, and my current favorite: MeteorJS. I just have to suck it up and learn JS to be honest...
Would I bet an enterprise app to use NodeJS if it was using my own money? Probably No. Would I bet my weekend projects and ideas on NodeJS/EmberJS/JS? Yes.
I think the JS ecosystem is still unstable and a big mess but let's hope it moves to a better direction.
- awesome dependency management systems like NPM and Bower
- awesome task runners like Grunt and Gulp
- NPM has thousands of plugins, more than Java's Maven and Ruby Gems [1]
- Github badge support for builds, test coverage, dependency versions and NPM
- Close second best StackOverflow support behind Java (without taking into account Node.js) [2]
Imo it's probably the most modern, stable and evolved ecosystem out there currently.
Also keep in mind that in Java, most people have 1-2 choices at most and those choices tend to be way more mature and stable so we tend to feel comfortable with those (at most) choices.
You can slice and dice my analysis anyway you want. You can say lack of choices is bad and millions of Java devs will disagree with you. You can say that NodeJS is evolving like mad and thousands of other more experienced Devs that myself would argue that NodeJS ecosystems is playing "see which one sticks". Your values are different than of mine.
StackOverlow stats you posted doesn't mean anything. Literally. We know JS has been around for ages. The fact that JS claim of fame to be smaller/leaner than Java yet rank #2 behind Java humongous ecosystem is a question mark in my mind: "What The Heck?"
It can go either way.
Gulp vs Grunt, NPM and Bower. Java has Maven. One tool. Yes, there are Ant and Gradle but let's be honest, Maven is king whether you like it or not. With Java, I declare the archetype (web-app or simple app) and dependencies and away I go (unit-test is part of the build, integration-test requires a few additional lines).
With JS, I have to .. ? Let me know if it's simpler than Maven. Let's not waste time to argue about XML vs JSON or whatnot, that's a matter of taste, let's focus on the required steps to build, run tests, and package it up whether as a deployable or a dependency of others.
...and Leinengen and SBT and perhaps a build tool for every other JVM language...
> but let's be honest, Maven is king whether you like it or not
Maven would do well to offer an alternative CSS/Gradle-like syntax (if doesn't already) because XML is still hard to read.
'Most stable' ecosystem? How do you figure that? It's only been around a short while in its current form. Other languages have had their current ecosystems hanging around for decades.
'Most evolved' ecosystem? Technically a single server-side javascript have existed since 1994, but other than JScript on ASP and Lotus Notes xPages (lol), nobody really used it again for non-frontend work until Node came around in 2009. AFAIK, jQuery was really the beginning of the 'modern' Javascript age back in 2006, and has slowly been adopting the practices of other programming ecosystems since. I would wager V8 was the biggest boost to JS development in the past 10 years, as it finally stopped being the slowest interpreted/scripting language in the world. Is there even a CPAN equivalent for JavaScript yet? It seems they've only implemented an equivalent of PAUSE or PPM.
Anyway, it's obviously getting better, but it's still pretty young.
As someone who used JS server-side from Netscape Livewire, to ASP JScript and even via Synchronet, and other JS runtimes... I've always appreciated the core language. Long before "The Good Parts" because Crockford only got a lot of coverage for what I already knew. Same goes for some recent adjustments regarding Object.create (and even inheritance chains in general).
JS at it's core is a decent language. ES5/ES6 enhancements make it very usable. Currently developing against Node 0.11.x --harmony, with a an es6ify for browser support. Given Node's very good async i/o interfaces, I've written a lot of bridges the past few years between systems that have trouble communicating directly.
Namely SOAP providers are a pain to consume in general a lot of the time. Not a problem to create a JSON endpoint in node that runs it fine. Need to process a huge XML or CSV file... Node is actually pretty nice... and can generally ship the final data where you need it.
Node is imho the ultimate service middle-ware... And to me, this extends to being the servers/services that web applications talk to... relaying to other backend systems/databases.
'That's likely, though it's honestly got the same things as every other programming ecosystem'
I disagree on this point because dependency systems like Gems (for Ruby) and PIP (for Python) are miles behind NPM and Bower.
I'm also not aware of popular task runners on other programming languages in the same way Grunt or Gulp are.
Perl isn't a language I know well so I can't argue on that.
By 'Most evolved' I didn't mean Node.js but really the NPM / Bower module ecosystem. You rarely if ever have to write something from scratch due tu a lack of plugins.
I agree with you thought that thanks to V8, JavaScript has a performance level that is close to compiled, lower level code.
Well I'd say his opening might be the reason: "As the companies I work(ed) for evolve from JS => jQuery => Backbone.JS => Backbone.JS + Marionette => EmberJS, so does my skill have to evolve."
It's evolving fast, and this makes it unstable in terms of knowledge and what's being used. Depending on outlook (or age?) this can make it exciting. It's also a pain in the proverbials to keep up with, and everyone's at different places (while the HN crowd appears to have moved onto Gulp, many people I know are just discovering & starting to use Grunt).
Thousands of plugin says nothing about whether it's a stable ecosystem either: the majority could all be high quality, or they could be scratch-an-itch-and-move-on projects.
It's true though that your value as a developer shifts quite fast depending on the trends. But I feel that a fast moving world is merely a consequence of super large communities like the JavaScript one.
By "stability" I meant that NPM and Bower are quite reliable. Also, if you look at the usage stats for the top plugins, the still show in my opinion stability since you have a lot of devs contributing through pull requests.
