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State of JavaScript 2019

2019.stateofjs.com

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Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#11

Post by rhacker »

cstuder wrote: post #7

The most interesting data in my opinion are the conflicting opinions on the overall state of the ecosystem:: https://2019.stateofjs.com/opinions/ While there is a sharp downtick of people who think that JavaScript is moving in the right directin, most agree that the overall situation in terms of complexity and velocity is getting better. I don't have any explanation for this, but would agree: Developing in JavaScript…

Generally have to agree there, but I do feel like there is a reason. ES6 modules (or typescript modules) and the simple fact that the variability is finally dropping:

It seems like there was one specific winner of all of the UI frameworks. React.

There is now pretty much one specific winner to package managers. Yarn.

There is one specific winner for language front-end: Typescript.

There are basically two front-end build tools left: Webpack and CRA (of which is basically a Webpack wrapper with babel and a million other things)

All of the latest npm packages are either coming with ES6 modules or, more interestingly either are completely written in Typescript or at least have @types now. And all that stuff helps people writing JS too.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#13

Post by fouc »

cstuder wrote: post #7

The most interesting data in my opinion are the conflicting opinions on the overall state of the ecosystem:: https://2019.stateofjs.com/opinions/ While there is a sharp downtick of people who think that JavaScript is moving in the right directin, most agree that the overall situation in terms of complexity and velocity is getting better. I don't have any explanation for this, but would agree: Developing in JavaScript…

I thought the interesting part was the fact the questions were strictly about JavaScript and not about the overall Browser/HTML/JavaScript ecosystem, which would probably have a stronger negativity bias I suspect.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#15

Post by shabbyrobe »

I find it kinda strange that Flow has been relegated to the write-in "Other Flavours" section so soon. I know that it has been trending downwards for a while (as TypeScript trends upwards), but it feels like that story's not quite over just yet even if the conclusion is foregone.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#20

Post by acemarke »

shabbyrobe wrote: post #15

I find it kinda strange that Flow has been relegated to the write-in "Other Flavours" section so soon. I know that it has been trending downwards for a while (as TypeScript trends upwards), but it feels like that story's not quite over just yet even if the conclusion is foregone.

Flow appears to be _effectively_ dead outside of Facebook. Or at least plateaued, at a very low peak.

For actual metrics, the NPM stats of TS vs Flow downloads [0] show TS usage skyrocketing up to >33M DL/month, while Flow has never gotten past 2.5M.

Purely anecdotally, I see numerous articles talking about projects migrating away from Flow, and absolutely nothing about actually adopting Flow at this point. Even projects like Jest, which started inside Facebook, have switched to TS to get more outside contributions. At this point, the only major project I can immediately think of that's written in Flow is (ironically) React itself.

FWIW, I wrote a blog post recently about my own experience learning and using TS as both an app dev and a Redux maintainer [1].

[0] https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=typescript&package=...

[1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/11/blogged-answers-le...

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