Introduction

The State Of JavaScript

Depending on who you ask, right now JavaScript is either turning into a modern, reliable language, or a bloated, overly complex dependency hell. Or maybe both?

What's more, there's just so many options: Do you use React or Angular 2? Do you really need Webpack? And what's this month's recommended way of dealing with CSS?

Like you, I spent far too many hours reading about all this, and at the end I still wasn't sure. So I decided to create a survey to see what everybody else thought. It seems like I must've hit a nerve, because I got over 9000 answers in just over two weeks!

Next Year's Survey

Given the survey's success, I'm hoping to do it again next year to see how the trends evolve. If you'd like to take part next time, just leave me your email and I'll notify you when it launches:

Table of Contents

The survey results are divided in the sections below. For some of the topics, I've asked experience developers to help me out with the analysis and provide their own point of view:

Partners

I wouldn't have been able to take time off to analyze these survey results without support from egghead.io and Wes Bos' courses:

egghead.io

There are a lot of programming resources out there, but in my opinion none cover the JavaScript ecosystem as well as egghead.io. Strongly recommended, whether you want to learn the basics or stay up to date!

Wes Bos

Wes Bos is known for consistently putting out approachable, informative content. His React and ES6 courses in particular have been a huge help for levelling up my own JavaScript knowledge.

Both have been a tremendous help in my quest to make sense of the JavaScript ecosystem (in fact Wes' React course is how I learned React from scratch), and you'll find useful links to some of the resources they provide throughout the survey.

Thanks

I need to thank all the authors who contributed write-ups for this project, all of it for free. And a special thank you goes out to Michael Shilman, who helped me with the code for the charts, as well as Tom Coleman, who helped me analyze the data.

I also want to highlight both Gatsby, the amazing React static site generator I used to build this site; and the great Recharts library I used for the charts.

With all this out of the way, let's get started with the first section: JavaScript Flavors.