Is Javascript the Jack of all Trades in the Software world?
There are so many programming languages in today’s world for any task you want! Heck, you can even spin up your own programming language any time you want — but amongst all the different realms, one language that I have heard about across different types of software development is Javascript.
Javascript is a pretty versatile language, and a huge reason behind it is its open-source culture. Every day, there are more and more languages and frameworks built on top of it (think React, Typescript and so on), and umpteen number of libraries built by developers across the world for anything and everything you want to do (npmjs.com is your place go-to place for all kinds of Javascript libraries and to even add yours too!)
Here are some of the common software development tracks where Javascript can be used in some form or the other —
In Frontend development
This is the first place Javascript was introduced and became insanely popular in 1996. You can create your web page with HTML and add stylings with CSS, but how do you interact with your static web page and have it take your inputs and perform different tasks accordingly?
The answer to this is Javascript, used today by 95% of all websites and an essential part of any client-side(user-facing) framework!
In Backend development
Okay, we figured out how to interact with a user through a web page! But where do we add our business logic of how a specific task should be performed? We might want to store some user-related data based on their inputs in a database and use them again later — so how do we interact with such a database?
This is where backend development comes in — and while there are so many server options here in all possible programming languages, there is also a very widely used Javascript option — Node.js. I used it a lot as a student, thanks to its vast library support for features like authentication, uploading images, pdfs or any other form of data, etc.
In Machine Learning
Machine Learning is a domain which has seen a massive boom since the 2010s — and it is only becoming more prominent and better! While Python and its frameworks have been a popular choice of beginners and developers alike for Machine Learning related tasks, did you know that Tensorflow (a very well-supported framework to create and deploy Machine Learning models) also has support for Javascript developers as Tensorflow.js?
This allows us to develop ML models in Javascript and use ML directly in our browser or Node.js backend. You can check out some interesting demos of Tensorflow.js here!
Mobile development (Android and iOS)
Mobile development has remained a very separate stream from Web development for years. It would have a different tech stack — including different ones for Android and iOS — and developers would usually have Android or iOS development expertise.
But ReactNative is one platform that combines Web development, Android and iOS development! Introduced by the Meta Open Source team in 2015 and written in Javascript, ReactNative has genuinely been transformational in bringing the whole ecosystem of web development and native mobile development together. Today it is heavily used by companies like Facebook and Microsoft. You can check out Facebook’s Explain Like I am 5 video on React Native, and guess what? You need to know Javascript fundamentals to get started with React Native.
In spite of the wide variety of usages of Javascript, it has its own advantages and disadvantages — like any other programming language. It is still pretty interesting to see how it has been able to adapt itself over the years as a tool to do anything and everything. I have Javascript (Medium’s tech stack) to thank for me being able to write this and share it with you all right now :)
