But What If JavaScript Is A Network?

There are a lot of things that are considered “JavaScript” these days. There’s the open language described in the ECMAscript standard. There are adjacent languages like TypeScript that offer niceties to coders in exchange for compatibility with the JavaScript ecosystem. There are environments like Node. There’s the power of instant access to years of coding effort through package management tools like npm. There is a nearly-infinite amount of infrastructure around the language, and even more infrastructure using the language to provide build tools or automation for other languages. And then there’s the ubiquity of JavaScript being interpreted within the web browsers on billions of devices around the world.

This breadth of contexts accounts for the popularity and dominance of JavaScript. Indeed, the most recent Stack Overflow survey of developers lists nearly 70% of them claiming JavaScript as one of the languages they use. (As above, some of the obstacles for participation in the Stack Overflow community can skew this kind of survey, so we should be mindful of those distortive effects, but the overall trend here is clear even if we account for those concerns.) And the percentage of coders using JavaScript keeps increasing, increasing by about 15% in just the last few years, even as other languages like Python keep growing as well.

What this suggests is that JavaScript may be reaching escape velocity as a network, and as an ecosystem of related technologies. To be clear, there’s no winner-takes-all here — domain-specific languages will always have their uniquely valuable areas of focus. But for general-purpose coding? Everything from spreadsheet macros to Internet of Things hardware seems to default to having JavaScript be one of the primary ways to make things programmable.