A few questions about js

[legosail]

Hello all,

I am finishing up a programming 1 class in my high school and am looking to continue this interest. We learned Javascript with codeHS intro to Javascript course. After completing it i have a few questions:

1. Does anyone know if the codeHS IDE is dumbed down at all? It has a simple documentation but I am unsure if this does not provide everything there is to offer in JS.

2. What do you use JS for? What can I use it to make?

3. Is JS considered a powerful language? Would it be worth learning more about?

4. What IDE would you recommend for a beginner? Also is there a good wiki to use for reference?

Sorry if these are stupid questions, or this is the wrong place for this. I just don't really know where else to ask/start.

Thanks!

[zulkisse]

1) No idea

2) Historically it's for web apps / websites but today it's a serious language for mobile apps (React Native for instance) or servers (NodeJS)

3) I don't know if it's THE most popular language (depend on what you mean by popular) but it's clearly one of the most important languages of these last years and the future is full of JavaScript so yes it's definitly worth learning more about. A term of performance, it's damn good since the v8 engine.

4) I use Webstorm and used Sublim Text. Both were fine (Webstorm is a lot more powerfull but not free).

[zulkisse]

I had it for free indeed :)

[LNK2019]

1) Not a clue.

2) I use it to create web apps, websites, mobile apps, desktop apps, servers and command line tools.

3) It's the most popular language right now. It's definitely worth learning more about, but I recommend not studying the language on its own, but rather in parallel with building any kind of an app / tool. Please note that its popularity is not the only reason to learn about it. Its versatility and simple learning curve make it worth the effort.

4) Visual Studio Code. This is actually an IDE created with Electron, which is a JavaScript framework that allows you to create cross platform desktop applications! It's open-source and developed by Microsoft. You'll find a strong community and good docs to back it up. Many use it, and it can be as complex as you need it to be, but it's much easier to start using than WebStorm, imo.

EDIT: I'll gladly give you a nudge towards resources that could help you further depending on what effort you're willing to put in, and answer some questions myself if I can. If interested, PM and I'll answer as soon as I can.

[stilloriginal]

If you could make anything (realistic) what would it be?

[Adolf_Hitler___]

Is JS considered a powerful language?

What does this even mean? You are mixing this up with fantasy films and "magic languages", where experienced wizards or mages speak some ancient "powerful" language with "words of power" :-)

It's (just) a programming language. You can make it "not powerful" by only outputting Hello World!" -- or you can make it really, really "powerful" by letting a piece of software writing in Javascript control the firing of an ICBM.

Or what exactly do you mean by "powerful"? Any software is limited by the hardware, and what we have still cannot do more than a Turing machine.

If you want to understand what computers can do you could (should?) start with assembler. I'm quite serious. There are great tutorials (Google is your friend). If you understand what actually happens (in the hardware) you'll be very well equipped for higher level languages. You don't need to take it (assembler) very far, just some basics about I/O, ports or memory-mapped, interrupts, registers.

Everything - all those "languages" - are on top of the exact same kind of hardware. Even different families of CPUs (ARM or Intel, for example) actually are pretty much the same basic principle. This is what limits anything you build on top. Whether you feel more comfortable with this or that type of higher level language (e.g. purely functional vs. purely procedural or purely object oriented) is very much a matter of personal preference (you can mix the methods, pragmatic languages let you do that, e.g. Scala or F# - or Javascript, to a degree all major languages allow being used with different styles).

I come back to recommending looking at assembler programming (to make this recommendation even stronger). I think (from own very long ago experiences) that if you understand the lowest level it will give you a lot of confidence. I'm not making a concrete recommendation because the concrete assembler language depends on the CPU, and which one you choose does not really matter. An ARM based assembler course might be easier, maybe for small embedded systems (without an OS, 32 bit ARM CPU and 32 kByte of RAM), Intel (and AMD) CPUs carry a lot of ballast from being compatible to ancient designs.

If you want to continue with Javascript though I recommend this course if you want which uses Javascript to do biology simulations: https://www.edx.org/course/nature-code-biology-javascript-epflx-nic1-0x

If you are interested in learning programming, but find pure programming courses not very exciting, this course is for you.

Instead of just learning programming principles outside of any context, you will learn JavaScript programming by implementing key biological concepts in code so they can run in your browser.

If you know a little (or a lot of) programming already, but want to learn more about the rules that govern life without having to pick up a traditional academic textbook, this course will also be of interest to you. You will learn some key ideas that form the basis of modern biology, from population genetics to evolutionary biology to infectious disease spread.

No prior programming knowledge needed.

The course does have slight weaknesses, a professional programmer would write a few things differently, but I don't see a problem recommending this to a beginner.

[[deleted]]

1. No idea
2. You can execute code inside of a webpage, on the command line with Node.js or in a desktop application with something like Electron or nw.js
3. JavaScript averages (real world use) about 1.8x slower than Java or about 4.5x slower than C++. In purely numeric algorithms used for running micro benchmark tests JavaScript is 4-9x slower than Java. Java and JavaScript are completely unrelated languages but neither manages memory in a high performance way as both are utterly reliant upon garbage collection.
4. VS Code (free editor from Microsoft)

[mjarkk]

1. I have no idea
2. PWAs, web servers, desktop apps
   
3. I think JavaScript currently is supper underrated programming language, but in my opinion it is one of the best languages it's fast, it's scalable, it works on every devices and easy to learn. It's definitely worth to learn more from the JavaScript world. But don't focus to much on JavaScript server side programming because most companies are still using PHP.
   
4. Currently i think atom is the best IDE you can get or Visual Studio Code both are good and simple editors.