Why is JavaScript So Popular?

Brendan Eich (father of JavaScript) never thought that JavaScript would become the most important language in the world. He created JavaScript in 10 days. Developers used to say JavaScript was a toy script, but after 20 years it has become the most dominant programming language in the software industry.

What is so great about JavaScript?

JavaScript can be used on the front-end and back-end, and also it can be found in mobile applications. Animations used to be done by Macromedia Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Today, that functionality is achieved with JavaScript in combination with HTML5 and CSS3. JavaScript is quickly gaining ground, and it’s been widely adopted by the enterprise with a positive impact on many parts of the technology stack.

Here are Redmonk’s rankings of languages quantified by popularity on GitHub and StackOverflow. JavaScript, on the upper right, is the leader in both metrics:

JavaScript popular libraries and frameworks.

Libraries and frameworks have been created by professionals to build small or large scale applications. Popular libraries and frameworks as listed below:

React
AngularJS
Backbone
Ember
AureliaJS
MeteorJS
PolymerJS
KnockoutJS
Underscore & Lodash
JQuery
D3.js
Karma
Grunt & Gulp

Popularity graph by Google

The JavaScript developer job market is growing.

There’s a huge demand for experienced JavaScript developers in the market. According to Glassdoor, the national average for JavaScript developers is $72,500, with the average in San Francisco and New York at $98,205 and $82,393 respectively.