6 reasons to learn JavaScript

Presentation held at Happy Hacking Day 2013 at Haaga-Helia in Helsinki, Finland.

In a nutshell, the six reasons to learn JavaScript are that it is:

1. easy: JS is a high-level language where things like type setting and compiling is done automatically, so it suits even people with no previous programming experience.
2. versatile: JS is multi-paradigm supporting among others procedural, event based, object oriented and functional programming.
3. open source: JavaScript is defined as ECMAScript, which is free to anybody to implement and all the best engines, tools and libraries are open source.
4. universal: Run JS in the browser anywhere or using Node.js standalone everywhere. JS is built-in in surprisingly many places, like NoSQL databases, PDF and desktop user interfaces.
5. in demand: Looking at job announcements for programmers and software developers, almost every position lists JavaScript directly or some JavaScript library like jQuery or Angular.js as an requirement.
6. because you’ll have to anyway: JavaScript is already everywhere, and with HTML5 it will be in even more palaces, so you cannot avoid it if you do programming professionally.

JavaScript is in many ways great and as the open source ecosystem around it grows, it is getting even better. If you don’t like curly brackets there are also options like CoffeeScript available. This is not a statement that JavaScript is always perfect. For example coding in C/C++ makes much faster programs. But as a general all around tool it’s great and if you only intend to learn one single programming language, then you should choose JavaScript. Start today by reading the book Eloquent JavaScript or by signing up to a JavaScript course at codeacademy.com.