TypeScript overtakes JavaScript
Unbundling popularity and software development languages.
Hey Guys,
This is an article about programming trends of the popularity of software development languages. A recent CircleCI's 2022 State of Software Delivery report(opens in new tab) found that TypeScript has now overtaken JavaScript to the number one position, toppling one of the biggest names in the industry.
Software delivery has never been more critical to the success of business in every industry. It’s also never been more complex.
So in 2022, Typescript has essentially overtaken Javascript and Ruby as the most popular DevOps language based on the work of 2 million developers.
TypeScript has Developer Friendly Features
The company says the change is likely down to its developer-friendly features, like allowing them to catch smaller errors locally and to commit working code more frequently compared with JavaScript.
In the annual “State of Software Delivery” report, what this firm does is analyze data from more than 250 million workflows. And one of the main conclusions is that TypeScript has been the most used in the last year to develop DevOps.
According to TechRadar, Top programming languages
From 2019 to 2021, only Python remained consistent in its popularity according to the report, which places the language at fourth place. Other top-ten languages include HTML, Java, and PHP.
Typescript, Rust and Python are overall the most loved programming languages of the last few years from what I have personally read.
Further down the list, HashiCorp (HCL) has entered the top-ten list, coming in at a respectable ninth place, leading the way for both HTML and Swift trailing one and two places behind respectively.
Even as of 2020, TypeScript was second to Rust as the most loved language. This is according to StackOverflow’s survey of over 65,000 developers. So what else can we deduce from the survey?
The landscape of tools, platforms, and architectures is constantly evolving. With this rapid pace of change and the growing challenges of complexity, how can engineering teams not only succeed but beat out the competition?
The recent study: The 2022 State of Software Delivery Report represents the largest collection and evaluation of developer engineering productivity data in the world: over two years of data from over a quarter of a billion workflows, representing almost 50,000 organizations from more than 100 countries, building over a quarter of a million projects on the CircleCI platform.
DevOps
The data shows that the most successful engineering teams routinely meet these 4 benchmarks:
They prioritize being in a state of deploy-readiness, rather than the number of workflows run.
Their workflow Durations are between five to ten minutes on average.
They recover from any failed runs by fixing or reverting in under an hour.
Their Success Rates are above 90% for the default branch of their application.
Popularity of Software Languages
These trends highlight changes in the broader industry for development teams at the leading edge of application development. Above are the popularity of languages from 2019 to 2021.
In DevOps — where MTTR is normally referred to as mean time to recovery — MTTR is used to measure how long it takes for the DevOps team to recover from a production failure. Here it's typically calculated as the average production downtime over the last 10 downtime incidents.
According to the report, here are the current leaders:
Success Rate
The high Success Rate of some of the languages at the top reflects low testing. These languages are not known for robust testing — they likely represent steps producing artifacts and output. Go, again, is an outlier here as dynamic languages include build and test steps for each of those languages.
Hack sells itself as the language for fast development and high Throughput, and projects using Hack on our platform show up at the top. Interestingly, Apex shows a growing number of Salesforce projects adopting CI.
Read the original report if the topic interests you.
Typescript overtakes Javascript as most popular DevOps language
TypeScript, say the report’s authors, “is a superset of the very popular JavaScript programming language that adds optional static typing.” Since its introduction by Microsoft in 2012, it has been rapidly adopted by developers as a scalable, human-readable language that facilitates collaboration and accelerates development.
This is all fairly interesting for new software developers.
Since JavaScript code is valid for TypeScript, migrating a JavaScript code base to TypeScript is relatively easy. Teams that have recently completed migrations to large scale from JavaScript to TypeScript include Stripe, Airbnb and Etsy.
According to the study and Gearrice, developers appreciate TypeScript because it offers type safety that allows developers to detect errors directly in their IDE (Integrated Development Environment) instead of at runtime, which reduces the risk of sending production errors. They also allow for quick onboarding and collaboration across projects, so productivity and reliability have been key to enterprise-level adoption of TypeScript.
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