As a passionate software developer who found himself in love with web technologies and its development aspects since he was young, I never hesitated taking deep dives into different languages and frameworks as long as it made me a better developer.
But not for too long, there was that one weird language with the endless fancy terms, frameworks, and libraries surrounding it. Its name was JavaScript
How it all began
Unusually, every time I saw a JavaScript code I felt scared and immediately tried to avoid it. However, I had no alternatives, I had to use it if I wanted to build fully functional web applications. and I needed to right away.
I started learning and using plain JavaScript without going into many details and didn't bother myself learning its breathtaking capabilities that everybody was talking about. That's not how I used to be and I hated every second of it.
People fear what they don't understand and hate what they can't conquer. ― Andrew Smith
The devil himself
I found myself unable to catch this fast-changing and infinite-usage language. and furthermore, being Introduced to it made me wonder how could people even love this devilish thing.
I mean look at this, this language even has an inconsistent syntax. And what does ES even mean?
As a result, All I was capable of is writing a poor quality code with a language that I didn't like nor fully understood. I convinced myself that I know nothing about it and I never will.
And now what? they are using JavaScript for server-side development and they're calling it Node? And what's Electron? When did all this come to existence?
OMG! this is too much to take...
DEV.to - Where have you @ben ?
I don't remember how I got introduced to dev.to (probably via social networks though), but what I do remember is becoming a daily visitor and a consistent reader. I found a community of developers sharing their love and enthusiasm for web development and that was the turning point in my whole career.
I found a post about npm_modules manager (or killer as it's called npkill) which was developed by two students with the contribution of their professor. I felt curious to see how it works so I cloned the Github repository and started the redo process. It was a Typescript Node project, so for someone with a Java background, I found Typescript pretty familiar and easy to learn and understand.
In love with the devil
I couldn't believe how fun Typescript development was, I even learned Angular and got my first job as Java/Angular Developer within 3 months.
This gave me confidence that I decided to give JavaScript a try and have a deep dive into it. And until then, I had no idea that most of what I've been doing is a statically typed version of ES6.
JavaScript, I understand you, let's be friends forever ❤️ !
Top comments (3)
Glad it finally clicked for you! I have to say, I really find TypeScript is the only way I can maintain any sanity while writing JavaScript (and I've been using JS for at least a few years now - it's easily my most proficient language).
TS is definitely the way to go for anything more than a toy project.
When prototyping/sandboxing, I prefer JS because it doesn't get in my way as much.
Woohoo!