How was the survey disseminated? My undergraduate statistics impression is that there is some MASSIVE selection bias going on. I can't put my finger on it, but (and feeling is important when doing statistical work) I feel something's off there.

Yup, "mostly learning from inline tools" in a survey on stackoverflow (which does contain a lot of really bad and dangerous code, but also some cool stuff). Since I don't look up stuff on SO (that often) I was not aware of the survey...

> the vast majority (93.2 per cent) of those who answered the gender question

Yes but of those who took the survey, how many did answer?

Also see representativeness above if thinking of making inferences about the population of JavaScript users.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-demographics-gender

about 1.5% do not identify in the traditional binary gender definitions, 1.5% prefer not to say, 1% as "Or, in your own word" - whatever that means.

Also: vim is #4 in the loved editors - just ahead of emacs ;)

I read that as 1.5% clicked the wrong option. 1.5% don't want to say and 1% are taking the p1ss.

#1 spot: online, from videos and blogs. Hm. Yeah, lots of good scarily bad examples out there... ;)

50% have been coding for 10 years or less. I feel old now. That would have been the case for me in... the 90s. (no wonder my colleagues keep getting younger and younger - I have now a sudent coding some stuff for me, I am more than twice his age, scary).

yeah, I too tend to look up some solutions online, especially when using features/tools/libraries I have not used before - or not in a while, and most documentation for libraries is in fact online. So I guess I too fall into the "learning mostly online" group nowadays. Oh, and I grudgingly admit that the online courses offered by Microsoft are not too bad as fisrt steps. However, I also tend to attend courses when confronted with (for me) new stuff, much better to get good examples and be able to pepper a pro with questions on why and how certain things should (or cannot) be done.

I cannot think of JavaScript as anything other than a hacky abortion that is an unfortunate necessity to get some useful website functionality, but putting that aside for a moment I am amazed that the use of a “framework” for a language is so prevalent and deemed acceptable. It says a lot about the language that such a framework is considered by many to be a standard requirement. Compare this to a language such as C - no frameworks here!

As an aside, I have written some quite clever JavaScript websites - you don’t really need any “framework” at all - just a lack of lazyness and some patience.

I've written some things in it as well but as a programmer I dislike coding it in. It reminds me of the early days of BASIC when a useful but untidy language was stretched far beyond where it was intended to go because of the commercial need to 'get something out now'.

I think there's a hidden menace in these statistics (let's ignore their potential unreliability for now). Reading between the lines it seems that the demands of web development require armies of young people pumping out code as fast as they can. Programming cannon fodder. Most of us who've 'been there' know that the quality of the code will suffer and the current (non) performance of websites and other cloud type applications reflects this. Could it be that much of our vaunted technology industry is really a form of Ponzi scheme?

It's fine that the code quality is terrible. A couple of years into the future, the framework that it's all written on is no longer flavour of the month, and most of the hundred other dependencies that were dragged in are no longer maintained at all. What's the point of building maintainable code on top of such a house of cards? Consider it disposable from the start. Throw it away and build a new one. Building code that'll be runnable and maintainable for a decade or more is such a 1990's concept.

Ponzi scheme sounds about right.

Should the JavaScript frameworks have a description other than Framework? In Java and C#, the frameworks are effectively a class library extending the language in useful ways (I've no desire to write an Array Sort).

In JavaScript, these 'frameworks' are more like layers on top to hide the ghastliness of JavaScript behind some more structured stuff. They're bordering on being new languages in their own right.

Friends don't let friends use JavaScript.

*A loud, boisterous, feisty raspberry of snarky sarcasm*

"Sadly, the vast majority (93.2 per cent) of those who answered the gender question listed themselves as male, up on last year's 91.1 per cent." It's sadder that, according to government statistics (hse.gov.uk) in the UK: "In 2020/21, 138 (97%) of all worker fatalities were to males, a similar proportion to earlier years".

It may just be that men are generally more interested in programming than women. To spell it out, the programming disparity is being casually presented as a problem when it may not be.

It is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. Finding yourself the only woman in your class or office is likely to be a discouraging situation to many.

"JavaScript remains far and away the most popular language among developers, notching up nine years as the most commonly used language in SO survey"

Most commonly used does not necessarily mean it's popular.

I despise JS, but unfortunately part of my work involves having to sometimes fix web sites / apps that use it.

So I'm a JS user, but an unwilling one (Burn it with fire is my approach to JS*).

A bit like when, pre COVID, I had to be in the office every day.

That meant daily train journeys... that did not mean I enjoyed the train journeys (be it the getting from A to B if lucky, the only once an hour timetable, the pocket hammering cost etc.)

But a survey of my travel would have shown train as the most used travel method (by number of journeys or by miles travelled) - so another "commonly used" but not popular scenario.

* In the unlikely event the current tensions in E Europe lead to global thermonuclear war at least I can look at the mushroom cloud and cheer myself up that its the end of JS too, so not all bad

Why not just use TypeScript then? Yes, it's a lot more than just a strongly-typed Javascript but it also gives you so much more.

Really, who cares about the gender distribution in self-reporting studies? Like other bits of web progamming, JS development has for years been outsourced to the cheapest bidder, so the survey is largely reflecting the career opportunities and choices in those countries.

But if you want more evidence that the survey is not representative then look no further than the number of respondents who want static typing! In Javascript? As if there aren't other, bigger problems with the language. But also with TypeScript there are alternatives for those who crave the staticness.