State of JavaScript 2020

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Geoff Graham on

We rounded up a bunch of published 2020 annual reports right before the year ended and compiled them into a big ol’ list. The end of the list called out a couple of in-progress surveys, one of which was the 2020 State of JavaScript. Well, the results are in and available to check out!

Just shy of 24,000 folks participated in this year’s survey… almost exactly 2,000 more than 2019.

I love charts like this:

Notice how quickly some technologies take off then start to gain negative opinions, even as the rate of adoption increases.

What I like about this particular survey (and the State of CSS) is how the data is readily available to export in addition to all the great and telling charts. That opens up the possibility of creating your own reports and gleaning your own insights. But here’s what I’ve found interesting in the short time I’ve spent looking at it:

  • React’s facing negative opinions. It’s not so much that everybody’s fleeing from it, but the “shiny” factor may be waning (coming in at 88% satisfaction versus a 93% peak in 2017). Is that because it suffers from the same frustration that devs expressed with a lack of documentation in other surveys? I don’t know, but the fact that we see both growth and a sway toward negative opinions is interesting enough that I’ll want to see where it goes in 2021.
  • Awwwww, Gulp, what happened?! Wow, what a change in perception. Its usage has dipped a bit, but the impression of it is now solidly in “negative opinions” territory. I still use it personally on a number of projects and it does exactly what I need, but I get that there are better build processes these days that don’t require writing a bunch of pipes and whatnot.
  • Hello, Svelte. It’s the most fourth most used framework (15%) but enjoys the highest level of satisfaction (89%). I’m already interested in giving it a go, but this makes me want to dive into it even more — which is consistent with the fact that it also garners the most interest of all frameworks (68%).
  • Javascript is sorta overused and sorta overly complex. Well, according to the polls. It’s just so interesting that the distribution between the opinions is almost perfectly even. At the same time, the vast majority of folks (80.6%) believe JavaScript is heading in the right direction.

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