Javascript's Niche
18 Jan 2023
My experience with JavaScript
For all of my life, I’ve heard complaints about how javascript is just a “scripting language” and that it’s way less useful than the likes of Java and C++ and Python. However, I’ve learned to disagree with that statement. Throughout my experience with JavaScript so far, I’ve learned that it’s much more than just a scripting language. I started learning it when I was around 10 on Khan Academy, and generally wasn’t very impressed with it. At that time, I had already learned a little bit of Java, and the version of JavaScript that I had learned was a lot less than Java. I didn’t learn any of the things that make JavaScript special, never messed around with functions, and barely even noticed that there weren’t any types.
Once I started relearning JavaScript in this class though, I saw just how much of it I missed. Athletic Software Engineering was a great way of learning this language, it emphasizes the different ways there are to solve a problem, while putting everyone into an environment where they have to learn if they want to succeed. However, if the language were python, or something that has more implications in math and algorithms, I would disagree with this method. In that case, it would be more beneficial for everyone to learn how to do things more efficiently, and learn how to see the differences between efficient algorithms and inefficient ones. In this case, the learning method fits very well with both the language and the area that the language is being used in.
JavaScript doesn’t have types, this works extremely well with the use case of JavaScript, being able to return ambiguous objects, functions, colors, strings, is one of the reasons that websites today are so versatile. If websites used a heavily typed language, they would look incredibly different from how they do today, they could take up more space for the same thing, and they would take longer to make for the programmer. Java has its lambda functions and its suppliers to allow passing functions as parameters, but the code has to be specifically designed to work in that way.
Conclusion
When it comes to working on large projects with large teams, like games, it’s better to have more restrictions on the functions that you make. This makes it much easier to debug, and also much less likely to cause a bug. However, JavaScript isn’t used as a video game coding language like C++, it’s used in situations where its specific upsides far outweigh its downsides. You wouldn’t use assembly to make a website. Javascript has been hated on by a lot of people for a long time, but each coding language has a niche where it’s more useful, and javascript is undoubtedly the most useful language in its niche.