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The State of JavaScript 2018

360 points by WA 8y ago

bobince 8y ago
The State of JavaScript 2018 is inaccessible in IE. That seems about right.
- fybe 8y ago
  It's hilarious. Doesn't work in IE, in Edge the button to start doesn't show and if you go directly to https://2018.stateofjs.com/introduction/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/introduction/ the navigation and styling is broken. And in 10 the floating squares don't even show up. And it doesn't have fall-back for browsers with no SVG support - really nitpicky but it is an actual problem.
  - rehemiau 8y ago
    Works just fine in Edge. And TBH that's good enough for me, I don't think supporting IE is necessary for a tech-enthusiast targeted site.
dkaigorodov 8y ago
I don't understand what is "Native Apps"? No links are provided. The description is "tools_descriptions.native-apps", on the page https://2018.stateofjs.com/mobile-and-desktop/native-apps https://2018.stateofjs.com/mobile-and-desktop/native-apps, which is probably, a bug. My guesses are: 1) Non-JS mobile native apps built on Java and Swift. 2) Native script https://www.nativescript.org/ https://www.nativescript.org/ 3) Smth idk about.
- rafaelvasco 8y ago
  Most likely it is Non-JS native apps, Java, Swift etc.
- rpeden 8y ago
  I'm guessing it was a bug, because now the page you linked to says: The majority of mobile and desktop apps are still built with native languages like Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, or Swift. NativeScript has its own separate page.
yread 8y ago
A great state of js survey. Hmm where do I click to see the results? Maybe it's on the homepage. click. ooh fancy. Start - sounds good. click. View results yes that's what I want. click. But I'm back at the start?! That actually sums state of js in 2018 quite well! On Android 8.0
matthewmacleod 8y ago
Really interesting to see what the trends are! I have to say that Typescript in particular has made me like the JS ecosystem a lot more again. Especially in combination with React – type-checked JSX quite often feels like magic. Of course, the downside remains that there is still a large number of JS libraries without type information.
Yuioup 8y ago
OK. So it looks like my love of Angular is misplaced. Great now I have to migrate to React.
milkers 8y ago
C'mon, is it that time of year again!!
sgdesign 8y ago
Co-author of the survey here, thanks for posting! Happy to answer any questions :) (As long as the question is not something along the lines of "My favorite library Foo.js is doing pretty poorly in your survey, surely there must be an issue with your methodology?")
- vaeix 8y ago
  My favorite library Foo.js is doing pretty poorly in your survey, surely there must be an issue with your methodology? ;)
- Digit-Al 8y ago
  Not a question but a suggestion. I live in England and am very aware that the residents of Scotland and Wales don't like to be classed as "English". You might want to change the title to the more neutral (and correct) Britain, Great Britain, GB, United Kingdom, or UK.
  - sgdesign 8y ago
    Oh I didn't even see that, thanks for the feedback!
    - Stoo 8y ago
      To be absolutely correct it should be United Kingdom, not Great Britain, as you also have Northern Ireland marked as England.
    - meigwilym 8y ago
      Here's a map to explain the difference. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2011/08/whats-the-difference-between-uk-britain-and-british-isles/ https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2011/08/whats-the-diff...
    - Digit-Al 8y ago
      You're welcome. I see you've changed it now. Glad to be of help :-)
veegez 8y ago
Been Waiting For this since Sascha was on the FreeCodeCamp Podcast
s_kilk 8y ago
Ouch, the ratio of "would use again" to "would not use again" on AngularJS stunning, if not surprising: https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/overview/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/overview/
- Etheryte 8y ago
  Offering my personal opinion on the matter, since I've used all three of the most popular libraries in large-scale projects. Angular takes a lot of work to get to know with no real payoff. Comparing the architecture to the other libraries, it's not as intuitive and it's not as easy to maintain; things that are easy elsewhere are often tricky or weird in Angular. I'm sure there are great developers doing good work using Angular, but in my experience it's easier to onboard people and MVP things using other tools.
- drinchev 8y ago
  My bet is that Angular pushes for using TypeScript too much, which makes you wonder where to start. On the other hand ReactJS & Vue work with TypeScript, but are not designed to embrace it. I've seen lots of questions about Angular on StackOverflow which should be classified as TypeScript questions, since they have nothing to do with Angular itself. I guess that's the confusing and non-attractive part of Angular. TypeScript is awesome and I love to use it, but some of my clients ( freelancing ) don't want me to write TS code, since they are afraid that it will be harder to find a substitute and will increase complexity - both are reasonable arguments.
  - woutr_be 8y ago
    I've noticed this too. And I think it's a pretty big reason why people are abandoning Angular. A lot of frontend developers I work with just don't want to use Typescript (or are afraid to), I've found it incredibly hard to push for it here.
    - 52-6F-62 8y ago
      As the resident TypeScript advocate at my workplace, I sympathize.
bigiain 8y ago
I guess people with javascript turned off are not the target market for this site, but I found this humorous: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2v31s94&s=9#.W_KD0idx2Rs http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2v31s94&s=9#.W_KD0idx2Rs
- megous 8y ago
  I can't see anything even with their js enabled. Seems like they depend on google analytics and fail if that's not loaded too.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    It's easy to wind up in that spot, irritating all the same though. I try to use everything I do with clean degradation with ad-block, etc... only local and/or cdnjs scripts required (if anything).
    - megous 8y ago
      Me too. I develop with umatrix enabled, with font loading disabled, so that I can catch these problems, etc. Forces you to use sensible technology, like svg and not fonts for icons, and catch these types of missing optional dependency errors, and not depend too much on a specific font in your design, so that if brwser forces something else, you don't start having overflowing text everywhere.
- pferde 8y ago
  I find it amusing that your post links to a page which itself doesn't work without javascript. :)
  - userbinator 8y ago
    Fortunately there is a direct link to the image there. http://i64.tinypic.com/2v31s94.jpg http://i64.tinypic.com/2v31s94.jpg
    - 8y ago
WA 8y ago
Good work Sacha! The data now gets more interesting, since it can be compared to previous years and trends become more clear. What I find most interesting is "All JavaScript development is considered clumsy" – kidding. What I find most interesting is the geographic distribution of tech. On HN, you mostly find positive comments on React + Vue, because they're super popular in the US. Other frameworks are popular in other countries. So while it probably makes sense to use React and/or Vue, if you're in a country that has a strong focus on, say, Angular, it might make more sense to improve the skills.
LandR 8y ago
> JavaScript is always changing. New libraries, new frameworks, new languages… It's part of the fun, No.. NO, it isn't.
- justanegg 8y ago
  Javascript-ecosystem more like.
- gear54rus 8y ago
  ...yes it is?
  - bacro 8y ago
    NO, it isn't...
  - shangxiao 8y ago
    yeah nah…
  - de_watcher 8y ago
    Using JS through time is like observing a freshman student who discovers new stuff in old books. Amusing, but we've got better things to do.
    - gear54rus 8y ago
      well it's certainly better than listening to ranting retrograde gramps "zomg new framework, I have to LEARN again :("
      - AllegedAlec 8y ago
        This is a fairly vacuous remark, if I'm frank. The problem isn't that you have to learn another framework (although it does become a problem when they're all slightly similar and they start to meld together after the umphteenth, not to mention that learning slows down with age). The problem is that each frameworks brings along new edge cases, new problems and forces you to reinvent tools you already had for this new framework. Although learning new shit can be exiting, at some point, you gotta stick to something for a while so you can also actually build a lasting product with it, rather than building a new prototype but never finishing anything because you're distracted by a new shiny.
yhoiseth 8y ago
Great work! I especially liked the quadrant charts in the conclusions, such as https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ because they provide a quick way to see the opinions from the survey.
k_ 8y ago
I hope Haxe[0] will make its way into this survey for next years, it's a solid JS (amongst other targets) transpiler alternative (better results than others, but less known). Also, seems like a translation string is missing for vim (displayed as "tools.vim" in Other Tools > Text Editors) [0]: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/
- sgdesign 8y ago
  Thanks, I'll fix that. Regarding Haxe, sadly it didn't get many mentions this year so we probably won't include it as an "official" answer next year. Maybe in 2020 though!
ksec 8y ago
People are generally happy with the development of JS the trends of always improving languages along with frameworks makes developing with JS makes developer increase in happiness for the third time in a row. ES6 is good, TypeScript is gaining ground, people are moving away from Flow. Angular is dead? Most don't even want to touch it again ( Great ). Ember hasn't moved a bit in three years with a declining of interest. I am also surprised no one is using preact. The Choice is now either React or Vue.js, I think Vue.js 3.0 will continue to move vue forward. Given the amount of hype with GraphQL, I am surprised only 20% are actually using it. And nearly 50% are using Redux! Backend is dominated by Express only, and Testing framework doesn't have a clear winner either. And my biggest surprise is how Javascript turned from one of the most hated programming language ( besides PHP ? ) into being acceptable and loved. I really wish other languages communities do a similar survey, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, Rust etc... It will be interesting to see the trend and big picture.
- daliusd 8y ago
  > TypeScript is gaining ground, people are moving away from Flow. Is it really the case? Both projects are watched and have quite big number of stars in github. I have tried flow and liked it. I have used typescript in the past and I'm not crazy about it. Therefore I would like to get better understanding here. Is there anything I could read about it?
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I don't have hard data, but a large part of this is probably ecosystem. TypeScript updates more often and, most importantly, almost every relevant library has TypeScript type definitions available. Interesting hard data would be the percentage of popular libraries with TypeScript type definitions available vs. those with Flow definitions available. I'm quite sure that would heavily tilt towards the former, though.
  - jaxondu 8y ago
    Don’t have to take the survey so seriously. It’s not representative of all JS community. My circle of JS hackers don’t even bother to participate.
paraditedc 8y ago
A bit sad that d3.js is not even mentioned here. To me it's a solid replacement for any MVC/MVVM framework. I guess it deserves its own category, maybe data model library?
- jrumbut 8y ago
  I think it's a real shame that D3 was never broadly recognized as such back when it first came out. I knew about it then, and made some small uses of it for SVG, but thought it was just an SVG generating library that could technically be used for HTML. I did a deep dive into D3 last year and it is amazing for generating HTML. I think in 2018 I prefer the model that React provides, but I didn't like approaches that required the sort of infrastructure React and Angular require back in ~2010. D3's use of vanilla javascript would have made it a top choice, and maybe would have promoted more D3 development.
  - jordache 8y ago
    no built-in routing, DI, templating, components.. No it's a poor tool for what you are suggesting.
- jordache 8y ago
  huh? People using d3.js as a library for generic data binding UI? It's technically possible I guess, but the API, with its enter, update, delete paradigms, is very much data viz centric. Not the best option for a general front-end UI library.
  - paraditedc 8y ago
    As a matter of fact, I use it to build web apps and it works pretty well: https://paradite.github.io/hn-ratio/ https://paradite.github.io/hn-ratio/ Source code (87 lines of JS): https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio/blob/master/app.js https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio/blob/master/app.js A sudoku solver I built with d3.js a few years ago: http://paradite.github.io/sudoku/ http://paradite.github.io/sudoku/ I think d3.js really striked a balance between raw jQuery/JS and full-featured React/Vue. I would recommend using it for building small-medium sized web apps with heavy data-centric UI.
tommyjepsen 8y ago
Is "Angular's Popularity Over Time"'s bad stats based on combining Angularjs and Angular2 into one?
- sgdesign 8y ago
  In previous surveys we had both Angularjs and Angular, but starting this year we stopped making the distinction. So yes, the "bad" stats include both versions. It's not perfect but we thought it was best to just bite the bullet and combine both going forward.
  - newman8r 8y ago
    I'd love to see what the stats were for Angular 2+ only - I imagine they'd look a lot different. If they'd chosen a more appropriate name for Angular then I feel like this wouldn't even be an issue.
  - ghego1 8y ago
    I think that mixing up AngularJS and Angular (>= 2.x.x) is misleading. They are two different frameworks, so little knowledge can be inferred by combining the data about the two. As an Angular Dev the most frustrating thing when v. 2 came out was precisely the fact that I had to re-study from scratch all the documentation. As a matter of fact I've used AngularJS since v. 1.1.x (2013) and I then switched to Angular (latest release) as soon as v. 2 came out, and I would definitely answer I'd use it again, but then if you asked me if I would use AngularJS, I would say definitely not.
bhengaij 8y ago
I think the site is broken on my phone. I'm going to plug in scala-Js because nobody I have told it about has resisted saying wow
dkaigorodov 8y ago
Great content and great visual presentation, thank you!
faitswulff 8y ago
I get these surveys every year and every year I find myself unable to complete them because the choices you can select are awful - I forget what, exactly, but none of the choices apply.
reichardt 8y ago
As a student currently studying and working in Berlin I wonder why Vue and specifically Angular are way more popular than React. Looking at local job posting Java and Angular seem to be king for almost everything. How come?
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  Vue is popular outside the workplace. React is still the tool of industry. Plenty of Angular stuff out there too. The survey highlights what devs want to do out of interest, not necessarily because that's where the job market is.
- pledg 8y ago
  Popularity with developers who reply to surveys is not the only factor in whether it is used. There's loads of sites that would need maintaining already written in Angular.
  - ix-hispana 8y ago
    There are lots of new projects being written in Angular as well. Just not in the United States, Canada, or Australia.
- WA 8y ago
  Did you look for jobs in Germany only? Because Angular is quite popular in Germany. I guess this is because in Germany, freelance devs mostly do "enterprise stuff" (for car manufacturers) and Angular is "the enterprise framework".
  - bastih 8y ago
    Reminds me of the prevalence of TYPO3 as a CMS in Germany, which doesn't seem to have a big following anywhere else.
  - reichardt 8y ago
    Yeah, that's my guess as well. Angular leaves you with fewer choices on how to structure your application. In comparison React only provides you with the view layer and even for routing you have to rely on third party packages. I personally enjoy working with a lean library like React but I can see why enterprises tend to prefere Angular.
jypepin 8y ago
Is it just me or the website is very hard to read?
- idoubtit 8y ago
  With uBlock, I added a local rule that forbids access to fonts.googleapis.com from this site. Now it is much more readable with fallback fonts. It is part of the sad state of the web that I often have to hack fonts and CSS of websites just to make them readable.
- dredds 8y ago
  Not just you. If you narrow the browser the index hides.
kojoru 8y ago
One important data point there is Visual Studio Code. It used to be really popular in 2017 (double the popularity of Atom/Sublime/Webstorm), now it's just eating everyone's lunch (triple the popularity of Sublime/Vim/Webstorm/Atom, almost equal to all of them combined). Also Atom is declining sharply. Compare https://2018.stateofjs.com/other-tools/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/other-tools/ to https://2017.stateofjs.com/2017/other-tools/ https://2017.stateofjs.com/2017/other-tools/
- pavlov 8y ago
  Microsoft owns both VS Code and Atom, so probably they're not crying in their beers about that... Anyway, props to Redmond for a major coup — from webdev pariah to owner of the most popular development platforms in just a couple of years! It took both money and sincere dedication, but they managed to effectively turn around the external perception of Microsoft in this field.
- vegasdew 8y ago
  VSCode seems unstoppable. From my limited understanding, it has very powerful architecture, and it will be most popular editor for .net, Go, Python, Rust in couple of years.
- nolok 8y ago
  Fully deserved from where I stand. I have 3 editors I regularly use, emacs when I need to edit something in a terminal (eg ssh'ed somewhere), Intellij when I need a full blown IDE (refactoring and debugging), VSCode for everything else. It's fast, well updated, works well ...
- SnowingXIV 8y ago
  This makes total sense too. I was so hesitant to use something besides Sublime forever, then I tested out Atom and it was slow (this has probably since been improved) and didn't offer much more so the trade off wasn't worth it for looking pretty. Bounced around a few others and then thought I'll try out the VSCode thing, hooked right away and it seems to keep getting better.
  - 8y ago
no_gravity 8y ago
It is interesting to compare the popular front end frameworks year over year. The percentages for 'Used it, would use it again': 2017: React: 58% Vue : 20% 2018: React: 65% Vue : 29% So both have been growing at a similar pace. Not sure about Angular, as in 2017 they listed 'Angular 1' and 'Angular 2'. This year only 'Angular'. Is that the combined number for both versions?
- intothemild 8y ago
  I would have broken Angular into two categories.. 'Angular 1' and 'Angular 2+' From what I've seen, if there's an Angular project it's still Angular 1
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Only Angular 5 around here.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > So both have been growing at a similar pace. Don't know if you can compare these numbers that easily: one increased their userbase by 12%, the other by 45%.
  - no_gravity 8y ago
    I think that measuring relative numbers would make sense if we assume exponential growth. But looking at 2016,2017 and 2018, it seems to be rather linear: https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/vuejs https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/vuejs
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      Fair point. I genuinely wasn't sure how to best compare it (also, I'm sure that growth slows down once a majority of users is awawre of your product, further muddying the picture).
imdsm 8y ago
Missing description for Storyboard.
Shamar 8y ago
This is very interesting: https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/#tools-years-of-experience https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/#tool... Nearly 70% of JavaScript developers have less than 10 years of experience (with an average of 8.3 years). This means they have never seen a Web where JavaScript was optional and Web developers were used to test their projects without it. This in turn explains their outraged reactions to anybody that dare to point out its severe vulnerabilities. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081 https://dev.to/shamar/the-meltdown-of-the-web-4p1m https://dev.to/shamar/the-meltdown-of-the-web-4p1m https://dev.to/shamar/i-have-been-banned-from-lobsters-ask-me-anything-5041 https://dev.to/shamar/i-have-been-banned-from-lobsters-ask-m... https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9v5qst/1487081_undetectable_remote_arbitrary_code/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9v5qst/1487081_und...
- Nimelrian 8y ago
  I think your link regarding experience should be this: https://2018.stateofjs.com/demographics/years-of-experience https://2018.stateofjs.com/demographics/years-of-experience
js4ever 8y ago
I believe JS will be the universal language in the next 5 to 10 years. Other languages will continue to exist but 90% of developers will do JS... I can't wait to quote myself in the future :p
- hu3 8y ago
  With the advent of WASM I'd be inclined to think otherwise: better languages eating javascript's lunch. One can hope.
leeman2016 8y ago
Really used to hate JS in the years before 2012/13. I struggled on moving away from desktop development to web app development. Then in later years found React/JSX/Redux, Typescript and VSCode ... and started loving it.
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nailer 8y ago
As a survey completer, they still don't include ES8 as an option: https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/ 'await' is a game changer for JavaScript: major libraries like Stripe and Hapi are rebuilding their docs too be ES8 based.
- daxterspeed 8y ago
  I believe the survey uses ES6 (which officially is named ES2015) to refer to the "current version" of ECMAScript (which I suppose is ES2017). I don't know if the solution is to include each yearly release of ECMAScript since ES6, or to simply add an "ES.Current" option, which would just be the latest proper release.
  - sgdesign 8y ago
    Next time I think we'll just drop the ES* item altogether and instead ask developers which JS language features they use directly.
  - nailer 8y ago
    Well yes, that's my point. There's a massive difference between using class and template strings with callbacks or 'then' vs actually using Direct Style with 'await'
georgecalm 8y ago
No surprises here this year: es6 & typescript, react & vue. I think I’d put redux and graphql in different categories as they’re not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, I’m happy to see excitement for the latter.
Bahamut 8y ago
I can’t remember prior years, but browsing this site on mobile has been the most painful web browsing experience for me in years (iOS Safari). Consider the design of the site in the future and mobile browser behavior - for example, tapping the bottom right button to navigate to the next view brings up the toolbar on Safari instead of navigating to the next page.
jgalvez 8y ago
No mention of Nuxt.js. This survey is biased/flawed.
- jgalvez 8y ago
  Ok, that was premature :) So it seems we're really not quite there yet -- fair enough. Was just surprised given there's a vibrant Nuxt.js community. Let's see next year!
yuchi 8y ago
Props to Sacha Greif, another work of art in design and visualization.
nepeckman 8y ago
The weirdest part of this survey is in many categories, the most experienced developers (and by extension, the highest paid) were using a less popular technology. Over 50% of people surveyed had heard of ClojureScript and were not interested, but the developers who used it and liked it had the highest average years of experience and highest average salary. Same goes for Ember and Polymer for frameworks, and Relay for data store. I'm really curious what the reasons for this are.
- arxpoetica 8y ago
  Ditto. While I really appreciate this ongoing survey, it seems like with a little more effort, a lot more could be gleaned.
- eat_veggies 8y ago
  Could it be that only the most experienced developers have actual production experience with the more niche tech? A junior dev is going to learn ES6, and Vue and/or React because they want a job, but learning Polymer/Ember/Relay/ClojureScript isn't worth the time because there are fewer jobs for it. But a more senior dev has probably maintained a few projects using that tech, maybe surveyed it for use in a new project, etc.
- Etheryte 8y ago
  For some insight, my experience is that oftentimes the more experienced developers are the only ones let near legacy, but valuable projects. Newer developers are often not familiar with the technologies and thus the risk of regression is higher.
- gymshoes 8y ago
  I suppose there are 2 reasons for it: 1. Popular languages would have lot more developers so lesser salary (Supply-Demand) 2. Since the newer devs have started their careers when the newer languages have started to get mainstream, more senior devs are the ones who remain with the niche languages.
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arxpoetica 8y ago
> Finally, keep an eye out for Svelte. By using a radical new approach to front-end frameworks, it's managed to generate quite a lot of interest and was by far the most mentioned option in our "Other Tools" category. [1] Glad to see Svelte [2] starting to get some attention. It’s a true little wunderkind. [1] https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ [2] https://svelte.technology https://svelte.technology
tonetheman 8y ago
TL;DR The state of javascript in 2018 is a dumpster fire. It was a dumpster fire in 2017... it will be a dumpster fire in 2019.
AngeloAnolin 8y ago
Website looks crisp and nice. Wondering if the source code for the site is available?
- jordache 8y ago
  right click -> View Source.
- supermdguy 8y ago
  https://github.com/StateOfJS/StateOfJS https://github.com/StateOfJS/StateOfJS. It's in the surveys/2018 folder
jordache 8y ago
that salary breakdown must be for world wide, including third world countries... $10K-$30K category?
vyking 8y ago
budding dev here! I'm so impressed with the :onhover action of 'Start' button of https://2018.stateofjs.com/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/ Can anyone provide me a direction how to achieve that?
- neednewacct 8y ago
  In sources panel open up the webpack:// folder and see ./src/components/elements/animation.js
- rpeden 8y ago
  First, see if you can figure out how to animate the boxes the way they are when you're not hovering over start: they're moving around the screen in a straight line until they reach the edge of the screen. The animation we're looking at is moving SVG boxes around the screen, so if you search for tutorials about how to animate SVG with JavaScript, you'll quickly figure out how to make the animation happen. Although the technique isn't really specific to SVG; it'll work the same if you're moving divs around instead. Once you've figure out how to animate DOM elements, to recreate what you saw on the start page of the survey, you'll want to keep track of each box's x and y velocity to know where to move them when you render each frame. If a box hits the top or bottom of the screen, reverse its y velocity, i.e. if its y velocity was 2, when it hits the top or bottom edge, it'll be -2. If it hits the left or right edge, reverse its x velocity. Next, let's look at what's happening when you hover over the start button: each of the boxes has an assigned position, and when you hover over the start button, each box rapidly moves itself back to its assigned position. And it is timed so that each box reaches its assigned position at the same time. To make that happen, you'll first need to figure out how far each box will have to move horizontally and vertically to get back it its assigned position. To get this, you just do (assigned y - current y) and (assigned x - current x). This will tell you how far each box needs to move in both directions to get to where it it needs to be. Based on this, you can calculate new x and y velocities for the boxes. Each box will have to move at a different velocity, because they'll all be at different distances from their assigned locations. I've deliberately been a bit vague here, I know. I was going to put together an example on Codepen, but decided against it because it is so, so easy to take a look at someone else's code example and think you know what's going on without really understanding it. Whereas if you learn how to animate elements yourself, and then follow the thought process I laid out, you're a lot more likely to learn this deeply and remember it. I hope this all helps, but if any of it seemed unclear, let me know and I'll do my best to clarify.
Raphmedia 8y ago
It is really awesome that they are using colorblind-friendly colors for the charts.
madmax14141 8y ago
18000 respondents are men vs only 900 women The State of What Men Think about Javascript but seriously how was this survey distributed and is there any explanation for the gender discrepancy?
- wild_preference 8y ago
  Maybe that's actual representation of the genders in the web development field. If so, then it's still "What JS users think of JS."
  - madmax14141 8y ago
    https://www.ncwit.org/blog/did-you-know-demographics-technical-women https://www.ncwit.org/blog/did-you-know-demographics-technic... According to this woman make up around 30% of web developers in the US. The highest amount of respondents are from the US so I would expect the woman respondents to be more than a measly 5%.
    - eropple 8y ago
      Eh. You raise a good and reasonable point but in this particular case I think you're comparing pomes to apples. "Web developer" is a pretty broad term, and was even moreso in 2012 when your statistic was generated. As an example: I'm a "web developer". But if I was surveyed about CSS (as a particular technology I barely understand, avoid using, and don't care about) I wouldn't respond. I would expect a number of my backend-focused colleagues to do similarly for other topics. Being aware of sampling bias is good and useful; I'd just worry a bit about pulling too hard on that ripcord here.
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majortennis 8y ago
2 data vis recommendations and neither are d3js
billdybas 8y ago
Ah, it's that time of the year again – always enjoy seeing where the JS ecosystem is moving. I would like to see two categories added for next year's survey: 1. Auth – would be interested to see if Passport is still the tool of choice 2. ORM – curious how Sequelize, Knex/Bookshelf, Objection, etc. compare in usage. I understand this survey will obviously skew towards frontend tools, but some of the categorization just feels off to me: For example, I wouldn't consider Next.js a backend framework. Sure, it's a server-side-rendering framework, but you wouldn't typically be using it for traditional backend things like accessing a database. Perhaps consider adding a SSR sub-section on frontend frameworks. The data layer section seems a bit confused – it's mix between client-side stores and server-side persistence which have very different use cases. I'd probably move out the databases into their own category - would be interesting to see which JS devs prefer (eg. Postgres, MySQL, Mongo). And trying to draw conclusions from the testing category seems odd when both frontend- and backend-specific tools are bunched together.
- tracker1 8y ago
  1. working on some of that now, going to hand-roll multi auth combined with password logins. I don't want to outsource my actual users' authentication beyond oauth to FB/Twitter etc. 2. I don't. If it's SQL, I use a tagged template string library, and just project from the response of the given library. If it's mono or similar, I don't see the point so much. I understand you can use type checking, but you can still do that at the API layer. As to the data layer, I agree... client side libraries and abstractions should be different from server-side tech... though there's some overlap (libraries that sync client-server for you).
mynegation 8y ago
For connection between technologies, this wheel chart type is not very helpful, things would be much clearer on confusion matrix[1]. It is a (ha!) confusing name, so it is better to call it coincidence matrix, but "confusion" is a traditional name for this already. The authors actually use thix matrix type viz many times in the report e.g. for correlating salary information to other categories. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix
liquidcool 8y ago
It seems to me that like last year, several countries with very large developer bases are underrepresented. I'm thinking of India and the Philippines in particular, where English is not an issue. I'm an American, but I'd like to get a good global picture. In addition, it would be good to see other indicators such as downloads, jobs (admittedly hard to measure accurately), BuiltWith trends, etc. Considering the millions of front end developers, this seems a very small sample size.
- gymshoes 8y ago
  I felt that the average salary for India was very high. I was hoping to see somewhere near $20000 but it was $30600

360 points by WA 8y ago

bobince 8y ago

The State of JavaScript 2018 is inaccessible in IE. That seems about right.

fybe 8y ago
It's hilarious. Doesn't work in IE, in Edge the button to start doesn't show and if you go directly to https://2018.stateofjs.com/introduction/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/introduction/ the navigation and styling is broken. And in 10 the floating squares don't even show up. And it doesn't have fall-back for browsers with no SVG support - really nitpicky but it is an actual problem.
- rehemiau 8y ago
  Works just fine in Edge. And TBH that's good enough for me, I don't think supporting IE is necessary for a tech-enthusiast targeted site.

dkaigorodov 8y ago

I don't understand what is "Native Apps"? No links are provided. The description is "tools_descriptions.native-apps", on the page https://2018.stateofjs.com/mobile-and-desktop/native-apps https://2018.stateofjs.com/mobile-and-desktop/native-apps, which is probably, a bug. My guesses are: 1) Non-JS mobile native apps built on Java and Swift. 2) Native script https://www.nativescript.org/ https://www.nativescript.org/ 3) Smth idk about.

rafaelvasco 8y ago
Most likely it is Non-JS native apps, Java, Swift etc.
rpeden 8y ago
I'm guessing it was a bug, because now the page you linked to says: The majority of mobile and desktop apps are still built with native languages like Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, or Swift. NativeScript has its own separate page.

yread 8y ago

A great state of js survey. Hmm where do I click to see the results? Maybe it's on the homepage. click. ooh fancy. Start - sounds good. click. View results yes that's what I want. click. But I'm back at the start?! That actually sums state of js in 2018 quite well! On Android 8.0

matthewmacleod 8y ago

Really interesting to see what the trends are! I have to say that Typescript in particular has made me like the JS ecosystem a lot more again. Especially in combination with React – type-checked JSX quite often feels like magic. Of course, the downside remains that there is still a large number of JS libraries without type information.

Yuioup 8y ago

OK. So it looks like my love of Angular is misplaced. Great now I have to migrate to React.

milkers 8y ago

C'mon, is it that time of year again!!

sgdesign 8y ago

Co-author of the survey here, thanks for posting! Happy to answer any questions :) (As long as the question is not something along the lines of "My favorite library Foo.js is doing pretty poorly in your survey, surely there must be an issue with your methodology?")

vaeix 8y ago
My favorite library Foo.js is doing pretty poorly in your survey, surely there must be an issue with your methodology? ;)
Digit-Al 8y ago
Not a question but a suggestion. I live in England and am very aware that the residents of Scotland and Wales don't like to be classed as "English". You might want to change the title to the more neutral (and correct) Britain, Great Britain, GB, United Kingdom, or UK.
- sgdesign 8y ago
  Oh I didn't even see that, thanks for the feedback!
  - Stoo 8y ago
    To be absolutely correct it should be United Kingdom, not Great Britain, as you also have Northern Ireland marked as England.
  - meigwilym 8y ago
    Here's a map to explain the difference. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2011/08/whats-the-difference-between-uk-britain-and-british-isles/ https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2011/08/whats-the-diff...
  - Digit-Al 8y ago
    You're welcome. I see you've changed it now. Glad to be of help :-)

veegez 8y ago

Been Waiting For this since Sascha was on the FreeCodeCamp Podcast

s_kilk 8y ago

Ouch, the ratio of "would use again" to "would not use again" on AngularJS stunning, if not surprising: https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/overview/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/overview/

Etheryte 8y ago
Offering my personal opinion on the matter, since I've used all three of the most popular libraries in large-scale projects. Angular takes a lot of work to get to know with no real payoff. Comparing the architecture to the other libraries, it's not as intuitive and it's not as easy to maintain; things that are easy elsewhere are often tricky or weird in Angular. I'm sure there are great developers doing good work using Angular, but in my experience it's easier to onboard people and MVP things using other tools.
drinchev 8y ago
My bet is that Angular pushes for using TypeScript too much, which makes you wonder where to start. On the other hand ReactJS & Vue work with TypeScript, but are not designed to embrace it. I've seen lots of questions about Angular on StackOverflow which should be classified as TypeScript questions, since they have nothing to do with Angular itself. I guess that's the confusing and non-attractive part of Angular. TypeScript is awesome and I love to use it, but some of my clients ( freelancing ) don't want me to write TS code, since they are afraid that it will be harder to find a substitute and will increase complexity - both are reasonable arguments.
- woutr_be 8y ago
  I've noticed this too. And I think it's a pretty big reason why people are abandoning Angular. A lot of frontend developers I work with just don't want to use Typescript (or are afraid to), I've found it incredibly hard to push for it here.
  - 52-6F-62 8y ago
    As the resident TypeScript advocate at my workplace, I sympathize.

bigiain 8y ago

I guess people with javascript turned off are not the target market for this site, but I found this humorous: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2v31s94&s=9#.W_KD0idx2Rs http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2v31s94&s=9#.W_KD0idx2Rs

megous 8y ago
I can't see anything even with their js enabled. Seems like they depend on google analytics and fail if that's not loaded too.
- tracker1 8y ago
  It's easy to wind up in that spot, irritating all the same though. I try to use everything I do with clean degradation with ad-block, etc... only local and/or cdnjs scripts required (if anything).
  - megous 8y ago
    Me too. I develop with umatrix enabled, with font loading disabled, so that I can catch these problems, etc. Forces you to use sensible technology, like svg and not fonts for icons, and catch these types of missing optional dependency errors, and not depend too much on a specific font in your design, so that if brwser forces something else, you don't start having overflowing text everywhere.
pferde 8y ago
I find it amusing that your post links to a page which itself doesn't work without javascript. :)
- userbinator 8y ago
  Fortunately there is a direct link to the image there. http://i64.tinypic.com/2v31s94.jpg http://i64.tinypic.com/2v31s94.jpg
  - 8y ago

WA 8y ago

Good work Sacha! The data now gets more interesting, since it can be compared to previous years and trends become more clear. What I find most interesting is "All JavaScript development is considered clumsy" – kidding. What I find most interesting is the geographic distribution of tech. On HN, you mostly find positive comments on React + Vue, because they're super popular in the US. Other frameworks are popular in other countries. So while it probably makes sense to use React and/or Vue, if you're in a country that has a strong focus on, say, Angular, it might make more sense to improve the skills.

LandR 8y ago

> JavaScript is always changing. New libraries, new frameworks, new languages… It's part of the fun, No.. NO, it isn't.

justanegg 8y ago
Javascript-ecosystem more like.
gear54rus 8y ago
...yes it is?
- bacro 8y ago
  NO, it isn't...
- shangxiao 8y ago
  yeah nah…
- de_watcher 8y ago
  Using JS through time is like observing a freshman student who discovers new stuff in old books. Amusing, but we've got better things to do.
  - gear54rus 8y ago
    well it's certainly better than listening to ranting retrograde gramps "zomg new framework, I have to LEARN again :("
    - AllegedAlec 8y ago
      This is a fairly vacuous remark, if I'm frank. The problem isn't that you have to learn another framework (although it does become a problem when they're all slightly similar and they start to meld together after the umphteenth, not to mention that learning slows down with age). The problem is that each frameworks brings along new edge cases, new problems and forces you to reinvent tools you already had for this new framework. Although learning new shit can be exiting, at some point, you gotta stick to something for a while so you can also actually build a lasting product with it, rather than building a new prototype but never finishing anything because you're distracted by a new shiny.

yhoiseth 8y ago

Great work! I especially liked the quadrant charts in the conclusions, such as https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ because they provide a quick way to see the opinions from the survey.

k_ 8y ago

I hope Haxe[0] will make its way into this survey for next years, it's a solid JS (amongst other targets) transpiler alternative (better results than others, but less known). Also, seems like a translation string is missing for vim (displayed as "tools.vim" in Other Tools > Text Editors) [0]: https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/

sgdesign 8y ago
Thanks, I'll fix that. Regarding Haxe, sadly it didn't get many mentions this year so we probably won't include it as an "official" answer next year. Maybe in 2020 though!

ksec 8y ago

People are generally happy with the development of JS the trends of always improving languages along with frameworks makes developing with JS makes developer increase in happiness for the third time in a row. ES6 is good, TypeScript is gaining ground, people are moving away from Flow. Angular is dead? Most don't even want to touch it again ( Great ). Ember hasn't moved a bit in three years with a declining of interest. I am also surprised no one is using preact. The Choice is now either React or Vue.js, I think Vue.js 3.0 will continue to move vue forward. Given the amount of hype with GraphQL, I am surprised only 20% are actually using it. And nearly 50% are using Redux! Backend is dominated by Express only, and Testing framework doesn't have a clear winner either. And my biggest surprise is how Javascript turned from one of the most hated programming language ( besides PHP ? ) into being acceptable and loved. I really wish other languages communities do a similar survey, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, Rust etc... It will be interesting to see the trend and big picture.

daliusd 8y ago
> TypeScript is gaining ground, people are moving away from Flow. Is it really the case? Both projects are watched and have quite big number of stars in github. I have tried flow and liked it. I have used typescript in the past and I'm not crazy about it. Therefore I would like to get better understanding here. Is there anything I could read about it?
- Vinnl 8y ago
  I don't have hard data, but a large part of this is probably ecosystem. TypeScript updates more often and, most importantly, almost every relevant library has TypeScript type definitions available. Interesting hard data would be the percentage of popular libraries with TypeScript type definitions available vs. those with Flow definitions available. I'm quite sure that would heavily tilt towards the former, though.
- jaxondu 8y ago
  Don’t have to take the survey so seriously. It’s not representative of all JS community. My circle of JS hackers don’t even bother to participate.

paraditedc 8y ago

A bit sad that d3.js is not even mentioned here. To me it's a solid replacement for any MVC/MVVM framework. I guess it deserves its own category, maybe data model library?

jrumbut 8y ago
I think it's a real shame that D3 was never broadly recognized as such back when it first came out. I knew about it then, and made some small uses of it for SVG, but thought it was just an SVG generating library that could technically be used for HTML. I did a deep dive into D3 last year and it is amazing for generating HTML. I think in 2018 I prefer the model that React provides, but I didn't like approaches that required the sort of infrastructure React and Angular require back in ~2010. D3's use of vanilla javascript would have made it a top choice, and maybe would have promoted more D3 development.
- jordache 8y ago
  no built-in routing, DI, templating, components.. No it's a poor tool for what you are suggesting.
jordache 8y ago
huh? People using d3.js as a library for generic data binding UI? It's technically possible I guess, but the API, with its enter, update, delete paradigms, is very much data viz centric. Not the best option for a general front-end UI library.
- paraditedc 8y ago
  As a matter of fact, I use it to build web apps and it works pretty well: https://paradite.github.io/hn-ratio/ https://paradite.github.io/hn-ratio/ Source code (87 lines of JS): https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio/blob/master/app.js https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio/blob/master/app.js A sudoku solver I built with d3.js a few years ago: http://paradite.github.io/sudoku/ http://paradite.github.io/sudoku/ I think d3.js really striked a balance between raw jQuery/JS and full-featured React/Vue. I would recommend using it for building small-medium sized web apps with heavy data-centric UI.

tommyjepsen 8y ago

Is "Angular's Popularity Over Time"'s bad stats based on combining Angularjs and Angular2 into one?

sgdesign 8y ago
In previous surveys we had both Angularjs and Angular, but starting this year we stopped making the distinction. So yes, the "bad" stats include both versions. It's not perfect but we thought it was best to just bite the bullet and combine both going forward.
- newman8r 8y ago
  I'd love to see what the stats were for Angular 2+ only - I imagine they'd look a lot different. If they'd chosen a more appropriate name for Angular then I feel like this wouldn't even be an issue.
- ghego1 8y ago
  I think that mixing up AngularJS and Angular (>= 2.x.x) is misleading. They are two different frameworks, so little knowledge can be inferred by combining the data about the two. As an Angular Dev the most frustrating thing when v. 2 came out was precisely the fact that I had to re-study from scratch all the documentation. As a matter of fact I've used AngularJS since v. 1.1.x (2013) and I then switched to Angular (latest release) as soon as v. 2 came out, and I would definitely answer I'd use it again, but then if you asked me if I would use AngularJS, I would say definitely not.

bhengaij 8y ago

I think the site is broken on my phone. I'm going to plug in scala-Js because nobody I have told it about has resisted saying wow

dkaigorodov 8y ago

Great content and great visual presentation, thank you!

faitswulff 8y ago

I get these surveys every year and every year I find myself unable to complete them because the choices you can select are awful - I forget what, exactly, but none of the choices apply.

reichardt 8y ago

As a student currently studying and working in Berlin I wonder why Vue and specifically Angular are way more popular than React. Looking at local job posting Java and Angular seem to be king for almost everything. How come?

beaconstudios 8y ago
Vue is popular outside the workplace. React is still the tool of industry. Plenty of Angular stuff out there too. The survey highlights what devs want to do out of interest, not necessarily because that's where the job market is.
pledg 8y ago
Popularity with developers who reply to surveys is not the only factor in whether it is used. There's loads of sites that would need maintaining already written in Angular.
- ix-hispana 8y ago
  There are lots of new projects being written in Angular as well. Just not in the United States, Canada, or Australia.
WA 8y ago
Did you look for jobs in Germany only? Because Angular is quite popular in Germany. I guess this is because in Germany, freelance devs mostly do "enterprise stuff" (for car manufacturers) and Angular is "the enterprise framework".
- bastih 8y ago
  Reminds me of the prevalence of TYPO3 as a CMS in Germany, which doesn't seem to have a big following anywhere else.
- reichardt 8y ago
  Yeah, that's my guess as well. Angular leaves you with fewer choices on how to structure your application. In comparison React only provides you with the view layer and even for routing you have to rely on third party packages. I personally enjoy working with a lean library like React but I can see why enterprises tend to prefere Angular.

jypepin 8y ago

Is it just me or the website is very hard to read?

idoubtit 8y ago
With uBlock, I added a local rule that forbids access to fonts.googleapis.com from this site. Now it is much more readable with fallback fonts. It is part of the sad state of the web that I often have to hack fonts and CSS of websites just to make them readable.
dredds 8y ago
Not just you. If you narrow the browser the index hides.

kojoru 8y ago

One important data point there is Visual Studio Code. It used to be really popular in 2017 (double the popularity of Atom/Sublime/Webstorm), now it's just eating everyone's lunch (triple the popularity of Sublime/Vim/Webstorm/Atom, almost equal to all of them combined). Also Atom is declining sharply. Compare https://2018.stateofjs.com/other-tools/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/other-tools/ to https://2017.stateofjs.com/2017/other-tools/ https://2017.stateofjs.com/2017/other-tools/

pavlov 8y ago
Microsoft owns both VS Code and Atom, so probably they're not crying in their beers about that... Anyway, props to Redmond for a major coup — from webdev pariah to owner of the most popular development platforms in just a couple of years! It took both money and sincere dedication, but they managed to effectively turn around the external perception of Microsoft in this field.
vegasdew 8y ago
VSCode seems unstoppable. From my limited understanding, it has very powerful architecture, and it will be most popular editor for .net, Go, Python, Rust in couple of years.
nolok 8y ago
Fully deserved from where I stand. I have 3 editors I regularly use, emacs when I need to edit something in a terminal (eg ssh'ed somewhere), Intellij when I need a full blown IDE (refactoring and debugging), VSCode for everything else. It's fast, well updated, works well ...
SnowingXIV 8y ago
This makes total sense too. I was so hesitant to use something besides Sublime forever, then I tested out Atom and it was slow (this has probably since been improved) and didn't offer much more so the trade off wasn't worth it for looking pretty. Bounced around a few others and then thought I'll try out the VSCode thing, hooked right away and it seems to keep getting better.
- 8y ago

no_gravity 8y ago

It is interesting to compare the popular front end frameworks year over year. The percentages for 'Used it, would use it again': 2017: React: 58% Vue : 20% 2018: React: 65% Vue : 29% So both have been growing at a similar pace. Not sure about Angular, as in 2017 they listed 'Angular 1' and 'Angular 2'. This year only 'Angular'. Is that the combined number for both versions?

intothemild 8y ago
I would have broken Angular into two categories.. 'Angular 1' and 'Angular 2+' From what I've seen, if there's an Angular project it's still Angular 1
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Only Angular 5 around here.
vanderZwan 8y ago
> So both have been growing at a similar pace. Don't know if you can compare these numbers that easily: one increased their userbase by 12%, the other by 45%.
- no_gravity 8y ago
  I think that measuring relative numbers would make sense if we assume exponential growth. But looking at 2016,2017 and 2018, it seems to be rather linear: https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/vuejs https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/vuejs
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    Fair point. I genuinely wasn't sure how to best compare it (also, I'm sure that growth slows down once a majority of users is awawre of your product, further muddying the picture).

imdsm 8y ago

Missing description for Storyboard.

Shamar 8y ago

This is very interesting: https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/#tools-years-of-experience https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/#tool... Nearly 70% of JavaScript developers have less than 10 years of experience (with an average of 8.3 years). This means they have never seen a Web where JavaScript was optional and Web developers were used to test their projects without it. This in turn explains their outraged reactions to anybody that dare to point out its severe vulnerabilities. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081 https://dev.to/shamar/the-meltdown-of-the-web-4p1m https://dev.to/shamar/the-meltdown-of-the-web-4p1m https://dev.to/shamar/i-have-been-banned-from-lobsters-ask-me-anything-5041 https://dev.to/shamar/i-have-been-banned-from-lobsters-ask-m... https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9v5qst/1487081_undetectable_remote_arbitrary_code/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/9v5qst/1487081_und...

Nimelrian 8y ago
I think your link regarding experience should be this: https://2018.stateofjs.com/demographics/years-of-experience https://2018.stateofjs.com/demographics/years-of-experience

js4ever 8y ago

I believe JS will be the universal language in the next 5 to 10 years. Other languages will continue to exist but 90% of developers will do JS... I can't wait to quote myself in the future :p

hu3 8y ago
With the advent of WASM I'd be inclined to think otherwise: better languages eating javascript's lunch. One can hope.

leeman2016 8y ago

Really used to hate JS in the years before 2012/13. I struggled on moving away from desktop development to web app development. Then in later years found React/JSX/Redux, Typescript and VSCode ... and started loving it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nailer 8y ago

As a survey completer, they still don't include ES8 as an option: https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/overview/ 'await' is a game changer for JavaScript: major libraries like Stripe and Hapi are rebuilding their docs too be ES8 based.

daxterspeed 8y ago
I believe the survey uses ES6 (which officially is named ES2015) to refer to the "current version" of ECMAScript (which I suppose is ES2017). I don't know if the solution is to include each yearly release of ECMAScript since ES6, or to simply add an "ES.Current" option, which would just be the latest proper release.
- sgdesign 8y ago
  Next time I think we'll just drop the ES* item altogether and instead ask developers which JS language features they use directly.
- nailer 8y ago
  Well yes, that's my point. There's a massive difference between using class and template strings with callbacks or 'then' vs actually using Direct Style with 'await'

georgecalm 8y ago

No surprises here this year: es6 & typescript, react & vue. I think I’d put redux and graphql in different categories as they’re not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, I’m happy to see excitement for the latter.

Bahamut 8y ago

I can’t remember prior years, but browsing this site on mobile has been the most painful web browsing experience for me in years (iOS Safari). Consider the design of the site in the future and mobile browser behavior - for example, tapping the bottom right button to navigate to the next view brings up the toolbar on Safari instead of navigating to the next page.

jgalvez 8y ago

No mention of Nuxt.js. This survey is biased/flawed.

jgalvez 8y ago
Ok, that was premature :) So it seems we're really not quite there yet -- fair enough. Was just surprised given there's a vibrant Nuxt.js community. Let's see next year!

yuchi 8y ago

Props to Sacha Greif, another work of art in design and visualization.

nepeckman 8y ago

The weirdest part of this survey is in many categories, the most experienced developers (and by extension, the highest paid) were using a less popular technology. Over 50% of people surveyed had heard of ClojureScript and were not interested, but the developers who used it and liked it had the highest average years of experience and highest average salary. Same goes for Ember and Polymer for frameworks, and Relay for data store. I'm really curious what the reasons for this are.

arxpoetica 8y ago
Ditto. While I really appreciate this ongoing survey, it seems like with a little more effort, a lot more could be gleaned.
eat_veggies 8y ago
Could it be that only the most experienced developers have actual production experience with the more niche tech? A junior dev is going to learn ES6, and Vue and/or React because they want a job, but learning Polymer/Ember/Relay/ClojureScript isn't worth the time because there are fewer jobs for it. But a more senior dev has probably maintained a few projects using that tech, maybe surveyed it for use in a new project, etc.
Etheryte 8y ago
For some insight, my experience is that oftentimes the more experienced developers are the only ones let near legacy, but valuable projects. Newer developers are often not familiar with the technologies and thus the risk of regression is higher.
gymshoes 8y ago
I suppose there are 2 reasons for it: 1. Popular languages would have lot more developers so lesser salary (Supply-Demand) 2. Since the newer devs have started their careers when the newer languages have started to get mainstream, more senior devs are the ones who remain with the niche languages.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

arxpoetica 8y ago

> Finally, keep an eye out for Svelte. By using a radical new approach to front-end frameworks, it's managed to generate quite a lot of interest and was by far the most mentioned option in our "Other Tools" category. [1] Glad to see Svelte [2] starting to get some attention. It’s a true little wunderkind. [1] https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/ [2] https://svelte.technology https://svelte.technology

tonetheman 8y ago

TL;DR The state of javascript in 2018 is a dumpster fire. It was a dumpster fire in 2017... it will be a dumpster fire in 2019.

AngeloAnolin 8y ago

Website looks crisp and nice. Wondering if the source code for the site is available?

jordache 8y ago
right click -> View Source.
supermdguy 8y ago
https://github.com/StateOfJS/StateOfJS https://github.com/StateOfJS/StateOfJS. It's in the surveys/2018 folder

jordache 8y ago

that salary breakdown must be for world wide, including third world countries... $10K-$30K category?

vyking 8y ago

budding dev here! I'm so impressed with the :onhover action of 'Start' button of https://2018.stateofjs.com/ https://2018.stateofjs.com/ Can anyone provide me a direction how to achieve that?

neednewacct 8y ago
In sources panel open up the webpack:// folder and see ./src/components/elements/animation.js
rpeden 8y ago
First, see if you can figure out how to animate the boxes the way they are when you're not hovering over start: they're moving around the screen in a straight line until they reach the edge of the screen. The animation we're looking at is moving SVG boxes around the screen, so if you search for tutorials about how to animate SVG with JavaScript, you'll quickly figure out how to make the animation happen. Although the technique isn't really specific to SVG; it'll work the same if you're moving divs around instead. Once you've figure out how to animate DOM elements, to recreate what you saw on the start page of the survey, you'll want to keep track of each box's x and y velocity to know where to move them when you render each frame. If a box hits the top or bottom of the screen, reverse its y velocity, i.e. if its y velocity was 2, when it hits the top or bottom edge, it'll be -2. If it hits the left or right edge, reverse its x velocity. Next, let's look at what's happening when you hover over the start button: each of the boxes has an assigned position, and when you hover over the start button, each box rapidly moves itself back to its assigned position. And it is timed so that each box reaches its assigned position at the same time. To make that happen, you'll first need to figure out how far each box will have to move horizontally and vertically to get back it its assigned position. To get this, you just do (assigned y - current y) and (assigned x - current x). This will tell you how far each box needs to move in both directions to get to where it it needs to be. Based on this, you can calculate new x and y velocities for the boxes. Each box will have to move at a different velocity, because they'll all be at different distances from their assigned locations. I've deliberately been a bit vague here, I know. I was going to put together an example on Codepen, but decided against it because it is so, so easy to take a look at someone else's code example and think you know what's going on without really understanding it. Whereas if you learn how to animate elements yourself, and then follow the thought process I laid out, you're a lot more likely to learn this deeply and remember it. I hope this all helps, but if any of it seemed unclear, let me know and I'll do my best to clarify.

Raphmedia 8y ago

It is really awesome that they are using colorblind-friendly colors for the charts.

madmax14141 8y ago

18000 respondents are men vs only 900 women The State of What Men Think about Javascript but seriously how was this survey distributed and is there any explanation for the gender discrepancy?

wild_preference 8y ago
Maybe that's actual representation of the genders in the web development field. If so, then it's still "What JS users think of JS."
- madmax14141 8y ago
  https://www.ncwit.org/blog/did-you-know-demographics-technical-women https://www.ncwit.org/blog/did-you-know-demographics-technic... According to this woman make up around 30% of web developers in the US. The highest amount of respondents are from the US so I would expect the woman respondents to be more than a measly 5%.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Eh. You raise a good and reasonable point but in this particular case I think you're comparing pomes to apples. "Web developer" is a pretty broad term, and was even moreso in 2012 when your statistic was generated. As an example: I'm a "web developer". But if I was surveyed about CSS (as a particular technology I barely understand, avoid using, and don't care about) I wouldn't respond. I would expect a number of my backend-focused colleagues to do similarly for other topics. Being aware of sampling bias is good and useful; I'd just worry a bit about pulling too hard on that ripcord here.

deleted 8y ago

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majortennis 8y ago

2 data vis recommendations and neither are d3js

billdybas 8y ago

Ah, it's that time of the year again – always enjoy seeing where the JS ecosystem is moving. I would like to see two categories added for next year's survey: 1. Auth – would be interested to see if Passport is still the tool of choice 2. ORM – curious how Sequelize, Knex/Bookshelf, Objection, etc. compare in usage. I understand this survey will obviously skew towards frontend tools, but some of the categorization just feels off to me: For example, I wouldn't consider Next.js a backend framework. Sure, it's a server-side-rendering framework, but you wouldn't typically be using it for traditional backend things like accessing a database. Perhaps consider adding a SSR sub-section on frontend frameworks. The data layer section seems a bit confused – it's mix between client-side stores and server-side persistence which have very different use cases. I'd probably move out the databases into their own category - would be interesting to see which JS devs prefer (eg. Postgres, MySQL, Mongo). And trying to draw conclusions from the testing category seems odd when both frontend- and backend-specific tools are bunched together.

tracker1 8y ago
1. working on some of that now, going to hand-roll multi auth combined with password logins. I don't want to outsource my actual users' authentication beyond oauth to FB/Twitter etc. 2. I don't. If it's SQL, I use a tagged template string library, and just project from the response of the given library. If it's mono or similar, I don't see the point so much. I understand you can use type checking, but you can still do that at the API layer. As to the data layer, I agree... client side libraries and abstractions should be different from server-side tech... though there's some overlap (libraries that sync client-server for you).

mynegation 8y ago

For connection between technologies, this wheel chart type is not very helpful, things would be much clearer on confusion matrix[1]. It is a (ha!) confusing name, so it is better to call it coincidence matrix, but "confusion" is a traditional name for this already. The authors actually use thix matrix type viz many times in the report e.g. for correlating salary information to other categories. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix

liquidcool 8y ago

It seems to me that like last year, several countries with very large developer bases are underrepresented. I'm thinking of India and the Philippines in particular, where English is not an issue. I'm an American, but I'd like to get a good global picture. In addition, it would be good to see other indicators such as downloads, jobs (admittedly hard to measure accurately), BuiltWith trends, etc. Considering the millions of front end developers, this seems a very small sample size.

gymshoes 8y ago
I felt that the average salary for India was very high. I was hoping to see somewhere near $20000 but it was $30600