Out With Javascript, In With Typescript - The New Favorite Language

Typescript has surpassed Javascript to become the world’s favorite language.

A new report by CircleCI gives data for 3 years 2019, 2020 and 2022. According to the report, Javascript remained in the top position for 2019 and 2020 but was replaced by Typescript in 2022 as the world’s favorite language. Before that Typescript was in third and second spot respectively.

Python remained constantly in the 4th position for all three years. HTML and PHP faced a continuous fall. Refer to the screenshot of the graph for other languages.

What would be the reason for Javascript's fall

Javascript for web and Java for android secured the first position in developers’ hearts as being the best programming languages. On 7 May 2019, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. Kotlin is expected to soon replace Java.

Typescript is an open-source programming language created by Microsoft and was released on 1st October 2012 whereas Javascript is a scripting language and was released in the same year as Java in 1995.

Fun Fact: Javascript creator Brendan Eich included Java in Javascript to get benefitted from Java's popularity while it actually has nothing to do with Java.

The main reason of Javascript's fall was that developers couldn't find it useful for writing server-side applications as the code becomes complex and heavy. Besides this, JavaScript wasn’t even able to fulfill the requirement of an Object-Oriented Programming language. This prevented JavaScript from succeeding at the enterprise level as a server-side technology. So TypeScript was created by the development team to bridge this gap.

Features of using Typescript

Just like Java, Typescript checks for syntax and run-time errors before the compilation of the program. This makes sure all Typescript codes have a standard of writing.

Typescript code is converted to Javascript by the browsers and is not specific to a single environment.

One of the most important points is that Javascript libraries can be included in Typescript.

Thus we can conclude that Typescript is nothing but Javascript with some major improvements.

Besides all these advantages of Typescript of Javascript, there is only one disadvantage that Typescript required more time to compile the code.

All these points prove Typescript's supremacy over Javascript for Industrial use and thus it got the first position on CircleCI's report for the most used programming languages in the industry.

Also published here.