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Rating of Javascript - Bear Bibeault & Yehuda Katz

 
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Bear Bibeault & Yehuda Katz,

Now that frameworks are becoming more popular, do you feel Javascript will ever take its place up there with Java in the "TIOBE Programming Community Index" language rankings as #1,#2, or #3?

http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index
It's 10th right now.
 
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Oh, if I could predict things like that I'd be playing the horses or stock market and be sipping a lovely beverage on my yacht.

JavaScript has enjoyed a Renaissance of sorts, thanks in no small part to the advent of Ajax, where it has ceased to be regarded as a toy language and is now considered an important part of the Web stack. The increase in the number of available libraries is a result of this increased interest in the language rather than the other way around I feel.

I also think that people are finding that JavaScript is a much more interesting language than previously thought. It's a language that tends to be used widely, but not very deeply by most of the people using it. I'd wager that the vast majority of JavaScript users would have a hard time explaining closures and function contexts (which is exactly why these very important and key concepts are covered in the book's appendix).

Whether the increased interest, respect and understanding will all mean climbing the index ladder or not -- well, let's all sip a lovely beverage and see what happens.
 
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Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
Oh, if I could predict things like that I'd be playing the horses or stock market and be sipping a lovely beverage on my yacht.



Indeed. Things like ratings are an incredibly fickle metric, and it's hard to tell. That said, JS definitely has been attracting the interest of many more companies, and as the Software as a Service model continues to move forward, we're definitely going to see more use of JavaScript as a serious language in the Enterprise. We've already started to see it in a big way, but I suspect we've only seen the tip of a very large iceberg.

It's interesting to watch the developments around JS2 (ECMAScript 4), which add support for more traditional classes, interface, and typechecking to the language, as well as notions like packages, modules, and program units. This should help make JS more palatable on the server-side as well, which should help raise JavaScript's general profile.
 
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Oh, and as a side-note, I believe that the metric used by TIOBE is not quite fair.

Check out JavaScript's Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=JavaScript&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

This matches TIOBE's declining popularity of JavaScript.

But take a look at JavaScript Libraries:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=jQuery%2C+Mootools%2C+Scriptaculous%2C+ExtJs&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

It seems as though the general search for JavaScript is declining, while searches for individual libraries are increasing.
 
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