Is Typescript Becoming More Popular Than JavaScript?

JavaScript has been one of the best web development languages for more than two decades, serving to create dynamic websites, mobile apps, and even server applications. Recently, new technologies like TypeScript have cropped up which extend the utilized JavaScript and provide features such as static typing, enhanced tools, and better source code control. This shift has sparked debate among developers about a new trend in which TypeScript is used more than JavaScript.

 

Rise of TypeScript vs. Overcoming Flaws of JavaScript

TypeScript is a development of Microsoft integrated in 2012 from the language, JavaScript, as a means of overcoming some of the language’s inherent flaws. It includes an optional type declaration that allows detection of errors during the application development rather than during its run. It is especially helpful for large-scale projects since a complicated code base is a factor for many problems such as bugs and inconsistency. It is for this reason that, in 2024, GitHub declared that TypeScript was the second most-encoded language on its site, making it more popular than languages such as Python.

 

Popularity: TypeScript vs. JavaScript

JavaScript is still the foundation of the web, but the research on TypeScript’s growth statistics makes for interesting reading.

 

Usage Trends

As stated by Statista, JavaScript is being utilized in 98 percent of global websites thus placing the tool as an imperative piece in web development. Still, TypeScript has demonstrated a rapid and continuous NPM download growth as it has grown by 47% year-on-year.

 

Developer Preferences

The rating, given by the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, where TypeScript became the part of the five most popular languages preferred by developers also proves its popularity. JavaScript is acknowledged to be popular but receives a lower score on satisfaction owing to the inability to see structure and errors encountered.

 

 Corporate Adoption

Google, Microsoft, and Slack are examples of large corporations that have come out to support TypeScript in their development. Microsoft Teams and Asana are completely developed with TypeScript proving the language’s flexibility and stability.

 

TypeScript vs JavaScript: What Are the Differences?

 

 

TypeScript comes with the benefits of static typing and hence is suitable for developing applications, especially for big enterprises that value the predictability of the application and very minimal issues with the programming language.

 

Applications of TypeScript

Enterprise Applications

Big projects are good candidates for TypeScript because they can take advantage of type-safe features and cut the number of bugs, which makes code more maintainable. This is why we can see many companies such as Airbnb and Bloomberg migrate their codebases to TypeScript.

 

Framework Support

The choice of TypeScript as the sole language supported by Angola has inspired countless developers. React and Vue.js are JavaScript first, but TypeScript is supported, which can make transitions easier for developers.

 

Open-Source Contributions

This means that TypeScript will be able to integrate with JavaScript which means that developers can contribute towards open-source projects and not necessarily master a new language. This has helped its use to increase across the community.

 

Tooling and IDE Support

Currently, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is known to have an excellent integrated development environment specifically for TypeScript.

 

Challenges Developers Face With JavaScript

Despite being the most-used language, JavaScript has limitations that can hinder its effectiveness in modern development:

 

Error-Prone Nature: Dynamic typing is suitable in large projects since it can cause runtime errors.

 

Scalability Issues: As projects progress, sustaining large codebases written in JavaScript becomes considerably complicated.

 

Limited Tooling: Although JS has a massive number of libraries, its tooling is nowhere near as good as TypeScript.

 

Benefits of TypeScript

Collaboration Within Officing Teams

When type definitions are clear, builders in a massive team can more promptly trace what other developers are doing, which accelerates onboarding time and minimizes misinterpretation.

 

Backward Compatibility

TypeScript works on top of JavaScript and thus hardly affects the developer’s work, but provides the benefits this article has outlined.

 

Ecosystem Support

Most integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio coders have a rich input on TypeScript, things like syntax error highlighting, auto-completion, and debugging support among others.

 

Why Does JavaScript Still Dominate?

Since the adoption of TypeScript has skyrocketed, JavaScript remains the most popular language used in development. It is easy to use and is seen widely, therefore perfect for creating the first model of an application as well as using it in restricted cases. Moreover, JavaScript has a huge community, and supporting libraries such as jQuery or Lodash, and frameworks like Express.js, guarantee its constant usage in the future.

 

What Developers Say?

In the survey, researchers found out that the trend among experienced developers is towards TypeScript. According to the JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2024, TypeScript users are now 64% happier with their flows than JavaScript users.

 

Learning delivery systems are also being transformed by this trend. According to Coursera and Udemy, the popularity of TypeScript has gained a solid 35% over the past year among both new and pro developers.

 

Will TypeScript Outdo JavaScript?

Some of the analyses from the industry are that TypeScript will steadily increase its adoption, particularly when used for organizational purposes. The fact is that shortly, according to Gartner, usage of TypeScript among new Web applications will be observed in 60% of cases. But JavaScript remains popular and will continue to be a base language for years to come because of this capability.

 

One of the milestones is the appearance of frameworks, such as Deno, which are written with TypeScript support out of the box. These innovations are expected to help promulgate TypeScript even further going forward.

 

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, it’s always about what a particular project requires between TypeScript and JavaScript. For major projects JavaScript as the best option for implementing different workings. Nonetheless, for big and complicated apps, in which changes happen often, TypeScript has clear benefits in terms of errors and maintainability. As the use of TypeScript increases in popularity, many developers will consider it the essential tool along with JavaScript for many projects.

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