Week 3 Technical Blog
Why is Javascript so popular?
That's not an easy question for me to answer. For me, I've always used languages that fit the situation I am in and almost always that situation was the workstation I happened to be sitting in front of. Therefore a lot of my webpages used JS because of the functionality it offers from within the web browsers themselves. For the last year though, I've 'graduated' to the jQuery framework to gain the libraries constructed to perform more complex operations, like fading. However this framework still uses JS as the language it is built upon and allows JS commands with it.
It would seem that others use JS because it offers a convenient intermediary between HTML/CSS and server side languages with the flexibility to grow to meet new languages. As mentioned, all the major browsers support JS, so the technology is already there for the taking instead of building new scripting languages from scratch that may need browser plugins or extensions to run. This ubiquity and flexibility seems to be why no one wants to set it aside even if it is derided for not being an actual programming language.
The other added benefit is that because it is executed from within the browser, it can utilize the website visitor's processing and memory resources to execute operations locally instead of relying on the server to execute everything and transmit to the visitor's computer, which would require much more bandwidth than is used today. Bandwidth capabilities may be increasing on a daily basis, but it isn't limitless, as shown by retail website crashes on Black Friday in recent years, so efficiency in how much a visitor's computer has to talk to the server is still vitally important to today's web culture.