This year's survey of JavaScript developers by the DailyJS reveals that there has been a move to server-side development over the past year but JavaScript developers are not diligent about tests.

The JavaScript Developer Survey was completed by over 3,000 readers of the DailyJS in a two week period at the beginning of December.

This pie chart shows how the much JavaScript experience respondents have:

Commenting on this distribution Alex Young writes:

The majority of readers have been writing JavaScript for three to five years (34%). I can’t help but feel this is thanks to the growth of Node – people rediscovering JavaScript after using other languages for server-side web development, or the growth of client-side frameworks like AngularJS and Backbone.js. I can’t imagine doing design without some JavaScript skills. 

The vast majority of respondents (83%) write browser JavaScript and almost half of them server-side; 20% write Mobile JavaScript and another 11% write "native" JavaScript - Windows 8, PhoneGap and so on.

Obviously many of the respondents ticked more than one box in this case and also when answering the question "Where do you use JavaScript?" with 83% answering "work" and 69% "side projects".

Around half the respondents claimed to use other primary development languages. All but one of them used PHP,  70% C# or another .NET language; 67% Java and 47% for both of Ruby and Python.

Only a minority of respondents (22%) said yes to the question "Do you use a language that compiles to JavaScript" and of these the vast majority (85%) used CoffeeScript with TypeScript being the other popular choice.

The area in which the survey revealed a shortcoming was with regard to testing. A quarter of respondents do test consistently, a slightly larger quarter never do and half of the respondents chose the in between response.

Although this may not be representative of all JavaScript developers, the DailyJS survey does reveal some interesting findings on the current state of JavaScript development.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info