It's that time of the year again: the leaves are turning red, the temperature is dropping, annoying Christmas music is being pumped through supermarkets worldwide, and the annual State of JavaScript survey is back!
This marks our fourth time running the survey. It's hard to believe it's already been three years since we started this project! To celebrate the occasion, let's take a quick walk through memory lane…
Or if you're in a hurry, just take the survey right now!
2016
The first edition ever was in 2016, the year of peak JavaScript fatigue.
While the weird pink-and-teal color scheme hasn't stuck around, a few signature characteristics of the State of JS surveys were already present from the start.
We already had that minimalist, "brutalist" aesthetic with monospaced fonts and flat colors; and we also had our five-option question format for every library question ("never heard of it", "want to learn it", "not interested", "would use again", "wouldn't use again"). From the start, the goal was not just to measure current popularity, but whether people actually enjoyed using each library.
This first edition was very successful, with over 9000 responses to the survey.
2017
2017 went even further in the "weird color scheme" direction with a daring purp'-and-yellow palette (what can I say, I was listening to Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg at the time).
But we had much more than purely visual changes. Even though this was only the second edition ever, we had an amazing 28,000 developers fill out the survey!
This was also the first year Nivo.js creator Raphael Benitte came on board, and his dataviz expertise made a huge difference.
2018
2018 is the year we hit our visual stride with a periodic table motif that was pretty well received.
We also switched to a dark theme, which made the charts and graphs stand out even more.
We "only" got 20,000 responses compared to the previous year's 28,000, but that might just mean the pace of change in the JavaScript ecosystem is slowing down. In any case it'll be interesting to see what happens this year!
2019
The main improvement this year is the addition of questions about JavaScript itself: which features do you use? Destructuring, arrow functions? Are you more of an object-oriented coder, or a functional programmer?
Another big change on the technical front is that we're now using our own home-grown survey platform. We just outgrew the form service we were using previously, and this will let us tailor our UI to the surveys even more in the future.
But enough talk, let's get to the action! Take the 2019 State of JavaScript survey and help us figure out this JavaScript stuff once and for all… well, until next year that is ;)
Top comments (8)
You might also have more success if you didn't ask for so much personal data (or clearly showed that it's optional somewhere). I have filled the survey out, but I doubt I'll do it again due to all the personal data questions. Just my two pennies.
All questions are optional, it's written in the sidebar but if you're on mobile you might've missed it.
Oh, that's good to know! Thanks for the info.
Yes, I was on mobile, so I must have missed it.
Didn't get all this hate about personal questions and the requirement to create an account. It took literally less than 5 seconds for me to create one and I didn't see any question out of what I'd expect in a survey like this. No parent's relationship question was asked lol c'mon guys.... This is the 2nd year I participate, wish to knew this from the beggining. Keep up the great work Sacha! I love statistics and to observe the changes through the years.
Nice work as always, I really like the theme and visual design that you have landed on for the site. It is always interesting to see the results and where JavaScript is headed. The discussions on podcasts and around the community when the results come out is always an interesting and memorable time, so thanks for doing it!
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