No growing pains here

JavaScript ecosystem members Angular, TypeScript & Meteor are a safe bet

November 14, 2017 Gabriela Motroc

#Angular #javascript #typescript

Steady as they go! Stack Overflow recently analyzed the most dramatic technology increases and decreases but even though we weren’t surprised to see that the Angular tag rules over the ‘most dramatic increase’ top, what’s more interesting is that a handful of JavaScript ecosystem members are at the top of the ‘sustained growth’ list. All the signs were there.

In a recent blog post, Dr. Julia Silge, data scientist at Stack Overflow, explored the most dramatic rises and falls in Stack Overflow questions by tag since 2010. To find the biggest growth, she looked at year over year change in questions asked for tags in Stack Overflow and concluded that Swift and Angular are the two tags that stand out.

According to Dr. Julia, these tags have something in common: “both of these technologies grew incredibly fast to have a big impact because they were natural next steps for existing developer communities.” Swift is a successor to Objective-C, and the angular tag on Stack Overflow is used for newer releases than the angularjs tag.

That’s not the interesting part though.

JavaScript ecosystem trinity: Angular, TypeScript and Meteor

Dr. Julia also analyzed the Stack Overflow tags with the most sustained growth since 2010 and looked “at the median annual growth for tags with at least 10,000 questions and find technologies that have grown at a high level over many years, not only in a burst.”

Source: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/11/13/cliffs-insanity-dramatic-shifts-technologies-stack-overflow/

The first Angular tag is the technology that has registered the highest sustained growth, followed by two other JavaScript ecosystem members: TypeScript and Meteor. Xamarin occupies the third position but it’s still impressive that Angular, TypeScript and Meteor rule the top 5.

Pandas and the dataframe tag are proof that if you’re not interested (yet) in data science and machine learning, you should give them a chance because they are among the fastest-growing skills for freelancers.

Check out the Stack Overflow Trends tool to see what the growth pattern of each technology looks like.

TypeScript — among least disliked technologies

TypeScript is not only the technology that has registered the second highest sustained growth — it is also among the least disliked technologies.

The least-disliked tags— R, Rust, Typescript and Kotlin— are all among the fast-growing tags.

David Robinson, Stack Overflow

Let’s go deeper (or back in time, if you will). When Stack Overflow introduced its tool Trends, we wanted to see how popular our favorite technologies are and we chose TypeScript — the result was quite impressive.

Stack Overflow’s Kaitlin Pike pointed out TypeScript’s growing popularity while at OSCON in Austin.

#typescript blowing up. Check out @JakubJedryszek and @OpenAtMicrosoft in #OSCON Ballroom F to learn more https://t.co/Xj6o8UPgxW pic.twitter.com/crl65nSMEF

— Stack Overflow (@StackOverflow) May 10, 2017

This is how this superset of JavaScript trended over time based on the use of its tags since 2008. Pretty exciting, right? If you want to read more about the benefits of TypeScript, check out this article.

According to the graph, TypeScript peaked in late 2012, then developers’ interest remained steady. TypeScript was back on their radar in 2015 and then the real growth happened. However, keep in mind that even though it seems like TypeScript was not very popular until two years ago, the tool tracks questions asked so, as one person pointed out in the comments section, “more questions can rather prove that language is more confusing/poorly documented.”

It’s definitely nice when the stars align and most results point in the same direction but you should take this information with a pinch of salt. We’re not saying Angular is not the belle of the ball but, for example, it occupies the 12th position in the latest Upwork Skills index.

Results differ from index to index so make sure you use the technologies you like or need, not just because they are all the rage.