If you’re serious about web development, then you’ll need to learn about JavaScript at some point. Year after year, numerous surveys have shown that JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, with a large and growing community of developers. Just like Python, modern JavaScript can be used almost anywhere, including the front end, back end, desktop, mobile, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Sometimes it might not be an obvious choice between Python vs JavaScript.
If you’ve never used JavaScript before or have felt overwhelmed by the quick pace of its evolution in recent years, then this article will set you on the right path. You should already know the basics of Python to benefit fully from the comparisons made between the two languages.
In this article, you’ll learn how to:
- Compare Python vs JavaScript
- Choose the right language for the job
- Write a shell script in JavaScript
- Generate dynamic content on a web page
- Take advantage of the JavaScript ecosystem
- Avoid common pitfalls in JavaScript
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JavaScript at a Glance
If you’re already familiar with the origins of JavaScript or just want to see the code in action, then feel free to jump ahead to the next section. Otherwise, prepare for a brief history lesson that will take you through the evolution of JavaScript.
It’s Not Java!
Many people, notably some IT recruiters, believe that JavaScript and Java are the same language. It’s hard to blame them, though, because inventing such a familiar-sounding name was a marketing trick.
JavaScript was originally called Mocha before it was renamed to LiveScript and finally rebranded as JavaScript shortly before its release. At the time, Java was a promising web technology, but it was too difficult for nontechnical webmasters. JavaScript was intended as a somewhat similar but beginner-friendly language to supplement Java applets in web browsers.
Fun Fact: Both Java and JavaScript were released in 1995. Python was already five years old.
To add to the confusion, Microsoft developed its own version of the language, which it called JScript due to a lack of licensing rights, for use with Internet Explorer 3.0. Today, people often refer to JavaScript as JS.
While Java and JavaScript share a few similarities in their C-like syntax as well as in their standard libraries, they’re used for different purposes. Java diverged from the client side into a more general-purpose language. JavaScript, despite its simplicity, was sufficient for validating HTML forms and adding little animations.
It’s ECMAScript
JavaScript was developed in the early days of the Web by a relatively small company known as Netscape. To win the market against Microsoft and mitigate the differences across web browsers, Netscape needed to standardize their language. After being turned down by the international World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), they asked a European standardization body called ECMA (today Ecma International) for help.
ECMA defined a formal specification for the language called ECMAScript because the name JavaScript had been trademarked by Sun Microsystems. JavaScript became one of the implementations of the specification that it originally inspired.
Note: In other words, JavaScript conforms to the ECMAScript specification. Another notable member of the ECMAScript family is ActionScript, which is used on the Flash platform.
While individual implementations of the specification complied with ECMAScript to some extent, they also shipped with additional proprietary APIs. This led to web pages not displaying correctly across different browsers and the advent of libraries such as jQuery.
Are There Other Scripts?
To this day, JavaScript remains the only programming language natively supported by web browsers. It’s the lingua franca of the Web. Some people love it, while others don’t.
There have been—and continue to be—many attempts to replace or supplant JavaScript with other technologies, including:
- Rich Internet Applications: Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX
- Transpilers: Haxe, Google Web Toolkit, pyjs
- JavaScript dialects: CoffeeScript, TypeScript
These attempts were driven not only by personal preference but also by web browsers’ limitations before HTML5 came onto the scene. In those days, you couldn’t use JavaScript for computationally intensive tasks such as drawing vector graphics or processing audio.
Rich Internet Applications (RIA), on the other hand, offered an immersive desktop-like experience in the browser through plugins. They were great for games and processing media. Unfortunately, most of them were closed source. Some had security vulnerabilities or performance issues on certain platforms. To top it off, they all severely limited the ability of web search engines to index pages built with these plugins.
Around the same time came transpilers, which allowed for an automated translation of other languages into JavaScript. This made the entry barrier to front-end development much lower because suddenly back-end engineers could leverage their skills in a new field. However, the downsides were slower development time, limited support for web standards, and cumbersome debugging of the transpiled JavaScript code. To link it back to the original code, you’d need a source map.
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-vs-javascript/ »
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