Just how useful JavaScript actually is?

This question is REALLY easy to answer!

JavaScript is EVERYWHERE and the awesome part is that it’s just getting warmed up!

JavaScript started off very weak and not exactly useful (when I started looking into the language JavaScript developers were called ‘script kiddies’ and not respected at all) and then JavaScript started to evolve, you were suddenly able to do things!

Fresh new standards and ideas started to emerge, Angular (https://angularjs.org/) hit the scene and you were no longer building web sites that had a bit of JavaScript to spice things up, you were building web apps!

Also, (in my subjective opinion) the big one hit NodeJS (https://nodejs.org/) (built on Google’s awesome V8 engine (https://developers.google.com/v8/) and it’s package manager NPM (https://www.npmjs.com/) appeared and the whole programming scene changed, out of nowhere JavaScript developers could do it all!

JavaScript had a problem, a pretty big one, it was restricted to the browser but with Node in play that was no longer the case and JavaScript developers jumped on the opportunity to do everything with it.

‘Front-End frameworks to quickly and easily build UI?’ Yup, there are countless UI libraries out there but the 3 most popular right now are Angular 2 ( https://angular.io/ ), React (https://facebook.github.io/react/ ) and Vue (https://vuejs.org/)

‘Back-End?’ Sure! Node, npm and it’s libraries (such as express (https://expressjs.com/) will help you with that.

‘Desktop apps?’ No problem, download Electron (https://electron.atom.io/) and you’re all set!

“But I want to write smartphone apps!”, you say? Well then just go over to Nativescript (https://www.nativescript.org) or React Native (https://facebook.github.io/react-native) and start coding, they both compile down to native code!