Is JavaScript the Best Language for New Coders?

Despite its many flaws, JavaScript just might be the best tinkering language for kids and new learners

The year was 2007. O’Reilly Media, a top-shelf technical publisher, had approached me with an idea. Would I like to write a book introducing JavaScript to complete beginners?

My response was immediate: Why?

It wasn’t that JavaScript was useless. But JavaScript was just one ingredient in a careful arrangement of technologies needed to build a website — and it was by far the least important one. Yes, a sprinkle of JavaScript pixie dust could validate long forms or make a button glow when someone hovered over it. But JavaScript was optional — take it out of a page, and everything kept working in more or less the same way.

JavaScript also came with some serious baggage. It was tied up with browser compatibility issues, slow, insecure, and distinctly unreliable. I had no interest in teaching someone how to create a useless JavaScript-powered web page widget. That idea seemed as pointless as the animated gifs of rotating globes that were all the rage in the early days of the Internet.

The most obvious way to use JavaScript, or so I naively thought at the time, was to let your big server-side¹ framework render whatever JavaScript it needed directly into the page. Yes, that JavaScript might be a bit bloated, but it was tailored to suit the browser on the other end, and nothing ever broke — even if the visitor turned off JavaScript completely.

Needless to say, I didn’t write the book. I kept coding on the web server and writing about my favorite technologies (usually C# and the .NET Framework). Years passed.

Then something strange happened.

JavaScript took over.

I still don’t think JavaScript deserves to be called the best choice in programming languages. I don’t even think it’s a particularly good language, if we’re being completely honest. But I have changed my mind about one thing. Now I believe that JavaScript just might be the best starting point for kids and new coders.

The one unrivaled advantage that JavaScript has is its reach.

JavaScript is everywhere — supported on every operating system, in every brand of browser…

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