My new playground: JavaScript
Why JavaScript?
As you may know, JavaScript is a language that is mostly used by browsers to do all the “logic” behind a static HTML page.
So, to take a more concrete example, when you click on a button and that there is something happening without reloading the entire page, it’s probably done by JavaScript. If you never saw JavaScript code, here is an example:
This piece of code will simply return the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence. This is not the best example, but if you want to know more about JavaScript and coding in general, you can follow the course on FreeCodeCamp 🔥 😊.
Now, a simple question you can ask yourself is why am I talking about a programming language?
Well, it’s because I really wanted to show how JavaScript changed my way of programming and how it changed the way of coding things in general.
Let’s start by the world 🌎! 😉
It all happened in six months from May to December 1995, when Netscape had a strong presence in the young web.
The founder of Netscape had the vision that the web needed a way to become more dynamic. Animations, interaction and other forms of small automation should be part of the web of the future.
So the web needed a small scripting language that could interact with the DOM (which was not set in stone as it is right now). But, and this was an important strategic call at the time, this scripting language should not be oriented to big-shot developers and people with experience in the software engineering side of things. Java was on the rise as well, and Java applets were to be a reality soon. So the scripting language for the web would need to cater to a different type of audience: designers. Indeed, the web was static. HTML was still young and simple enough for non-developers to pick up. So whatever was to be part of the browser to make the web more dynamic should be accessible to non-programmers. And so the idea of Mocha was born. Mocha was to become a scripting language for the web. Simple, dynamic, and accessible to non-developers.
That's how JavaScript was invented. And, from 1995 until 2009, JavaScript was only for browsers, it didn't have any other purpose.
And then, Node.JS arrived and the world 🌎 changed because JavaScript could now be used as a backend language (a language for servers 🎉!).
From 2009 until now, the JavaScript gained a lot of popularity, because other people saw the interest in this awesome 😎 language. These people made great 👍 projects, such as Cordova (to build native apps on your phone 📱 using JavaScript), Electron (same as Cordova but for Desktop and with a bit more features), jQuery (simplify DOM manipulation), etc…
Now, JavaScript is by far the most popular language in the entire universe 😂!
Now, let’s talk about me 😎
The first time I coded is when I wanted to manage my old website (definitely not available now 😂), I simply wanted to add a visitor counter, a member zone, etc…
So, I learned PHP 🐘, which I still consider it as a great language even if JavaScript is on some points better.
2 years after learning PHP 🐘, my friend learned code, but instead of learning backend development, he learned frontend (HTML, CSS, JS).
And he kept telling me that I should switch because frontend is fantastic, so, 2 or 3 months after, I started to learn CSS and JavaScript (I already knew about HTML from my PHP 🐘 experience).
And I really think he was right because frontend web development is super dynamic (I mean that there is a lot of people active in this area) and that it’s not that far from the backend.
I played a lot with JavaScript and 2 month ago, I decided to create my own framework.
Which I did, and I just published yesterday. You should definitely check it out! This framework is called DisplayJS and it's basically a package 📦 of multiple features from other frameworks with a jQuery like syntax.
I know that this explanation is certainly not the best because DisplayJS is very different from other frameworks.
Conclusion
I relly hope you learned a bit about me and how I love ❤️ JavaScript. Again, I hope you’ll star ⭐️ my project on GitHub 😊.
