JavaScript Is Dead - What You Need To Do

Now, I know you saw the title of this video and you're probably wondering, "What the heck clickbait nonsense is this? JavaScript's not dying. It's the most popular language out there." And technically, you are correct. JavaScript is one of, if not the most popular programming language, but it's actually dying. And the reason for that is because of Typescript. TypeScript has almost entirely taken over JavaScript. And in this video, I'm going to be going through a bunch of different charts and diagrams, showing you this change between JavaScript and TypeScript, talking about what some of the benefits of TypeScript are, even referencing different research documents, and showing you my own analysis of various different things inside of TypeScript versus JavaScript. But that's not the only thing I'm going to cover because at the end of this video, I'm going to be talking about what you can do to make sure that you bridge this gap to be able to properly land a job as a TypeScript developer. Because in reality, most JavaScript jobs require you to actually know Typescript. Welcome back to WebDev Simplified. My name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner. And to get started, we need to go through a bit of history of JavaScript versus TypeScript to really see how quickly this change has been brought upon us. For example, here is a survey from 2016. This is the state of JS survey. And this particular question is asking people whether they have used different flavors of JavaScript. This was back when there was more than just TypeScript as an option. And the red sections of this graph, this red and pink is people that have used this tool before. And the blue sections are people that have never even used it a single time. So, as you can see here, obviously JavaScript itself is pretty much used 100% of people have used it. There's only a few people that haven't. And back in 2016, ES6 was actually quite new. So, you can see they have their own chart for ES6. That's how old this data is. And if you look here, there's actually multiple different variants of JavaScript. But the one I really care about the most is TypeScript. You can see here 25% of developers have actually used TypeScript before. But that means that 75% of developers have never even used TypeScript at all. And so 10 years ago, TypeScript was kind of a niche thing that only a few people used. Now, if we fast forward a little bit, you can see how quickly this changed. If we look at the 2020 survey, we have the exact same data, but you can see it shows us all the data from 2016 all the way up to 2020. And the big thing you'll notice with Typescript is back in 2016, you can see it started at 25%, but every year this actually grew a substantial amount, about 15 or so percent every single year, all the way up to where we are in 2020, which is 78%. Now, this is still 6 years ago, but you can see that 3/4 of all developers have used TypeScript at some point, which is really important, and that's going to even increase further as we go on. Now, if we jump forward, we can go into 2021 and you'll see that they don't have the exact same data, but they do have a question asking about what is the biggest feature missing from JavaScript. And the top answer is static typing. So, everybody is wanting types inside of JavaScript, and they're resorting to TypeScript for that because JavaScript's not supplying it. And it doesn't look like they're going to be supplying that anytime soon. Now, when we jump further into 2022, this is where we get a much more interesting chart all the way up until present day. And this chart shows you the amount of people using pure JavaScript, pure TypeScript, and everything in between. So you can see inside of this chart, 11% of all people are using just pure JavaScript, no TypeScript at all. And on the other side of the spectrum, 28% of people are using pure TypeScript with no JavaScript at all. And already in 2022, you can see that there's a massive difference. Way more people are using a high percentage of TypeScript than people using a high percentage of JavaScript. And this only gets more drastic as we continue on. You can see in 2023 that again we have a massive chunk of people using 100% TypeScript or close to it and a very few amount of people using pure JavaScript. In 2024 it only becomes a larger gap. And in 2025 the most recent survey you can see that this gap is again even wider. If we look here people using 100% TypeScript or essentially almost 100% that accounts for 67% of all developers and only 10% of people are using essentially pure JavaScript. So there's a massive change towards using more and more TypeScript. Even just in the last year between 2024 and 2026 or 2025, sorry, there is a 6% increase in the number of people using 100% pure Typescript. That is a huge change inside of this particular graph. Now, currently there's no data out for 2026 yet cuz it's relatively early in the year, but I took this 2025 data and I actually extrapolated a bit further to really see what's going on. If we look at this experience tab right here that I've created, you can see I've broken down the respondents based on four different categories. We have under 10 years of experience in the top left here. We have between 10 and 20 years of experience in this top right. If we scroll down here, we have between 20 and 30 years of experience in this bottom left. And then finally on this bottom right, we have people with over 30 years of experience. And the big thing that you'll notice is that a large majority of these non-Typescript users are people in that over 30 years of experience category. which essentially means that developers that have been working at companies for very long periods of time, most likely staying at the same company for this extended period of time are working on older legacy code bases that don't have TypeScript in them. So the more likely you are to work on a legacy codebase, the less likely you are to use TypeScript. But if you're a younger developer, maybe working on a newer project, you can see that the amount of these people using TypeScript is drastic. You can see here it's about 70% of all developers are using pretty much 100% pure TypeScript. But the thing that I think really makes this interesting is when we look at the salary because you'll notice the most amount of people using TypeScript have the least amount of experience. So you would think that the more JavaScript you use, the higher your salary would be because these people with over 30 years of experience, they're going to most likely have the highest salary. But you'll notice when we look at the salary chart, that's not what happens. I've broken this down. So everyone making under 60,000 is in this top left. Anyone making between 60 and 100,000 is in the top right. 100 to 150 is in this bottom left. And then anyone making more than 200,000 is going to be in this right hand side category. Now if we look at the data here, you'll notice that at the lower salary marks, you can see that the percentage of people using the TypeScript at pretty much 100% here is going to be about 64%. If we add these two different numbers together, while if we go all the way to the other extreme, the highest salary margin that we have here, you can see that the amount of people using Typescript is about 73%. So it's an almost 10% increase in people that are using TypeScript essentially 100% of the time are making the most amount of money. So if you want to make more money, become a Typescript developer because they get paid more than a pure JavaScript developer on average. Now this is of course across a bunch of different surveys with a bunch of different people. So it may not be indicative of your exact environment, but in general, if you know TypeScript, you're going to be making more money as a developer than someone that is doing just pure JavaScript. And before I start diving into some of the concepts of why I think TypeScript actually is better for you as a developer than just JavaScript on its own, I want to talk about some jobs data as well. If we come over here and we take a look at some of the data that I've compiled myself, if we look at the Indeed jobs that are listed for a React developer for React plus JavaScript or React plus TypeScript, you'll notice there's about 39,000 jobs for React and JavaScript developer. So like someone that knows React and it's a JavaScript specific job. That's what they're looking for is a JavaScript React developer. Well, if you're looking for a React developer that knows TypeScript, there are 89,000 jobs. That is a massive increase. It's like about two and a half times more people that know Typescript than know JavaScript for jobs. So, there are more jobs for TypeScript developers than there are for React developers. It becomes even more drastic when you look at listings for all front-end developers, not just React. And you look to see if Typescript is either required or preferred inside that application. And you'll see that 82% of all front-end jobs that ask for JavaScript in some regard either have a requirement for TypeScript or a preference for TypeScript. Which means only 18% of these front-end jobs are for JavaScript only developers. That's a very small amount of people that are using JavaScript on a day-to-day basis. And this percentage actually correlates almost exactly to the percentage I see when I look at the Stack Overflow chart. This essentially just asks people in a professional environment. So this is people that have used this tool professionally. What do you use as a programming language? 68.8% of people say that they use JavaScript, while 48.8% of people say that they use TypeScript. Now, this survey is for people that use tons of different languages, not just JavaScript developers. But you can see here there's about a 20% difference between JavaScript and TypeScript. The interesting thing to note, though, is that anyone that uses TypeScript already uses JavaScript. So, essentially what this chart is saying is if we subtract the 48.8% 8% of people that use TypeScript form the JavaScript number. We're left over with exactly 20% of people that use JavaScript but don't use TypeScript at all. And if you notice, that's essentially the same thing you see here in these front-end developer jobs. About 20% of jobs are for JavaScript only developers, while the other 80% are for people that use TypeScript instead of just JavaScript. It's kind of the exact same numbers you see here on Stack Overflow as well. So I think this is something that's really interesting because there are more developers using TypeScript than there are developers using just pure JavaScript. And when we look at the state of JS survey like we already have, you'll see that this number is even more exasperated because this really is a more indicative of the actual front-end developer experience and even back-end developer experience because this is really for JavaScript specific developers while Stack Overflow includes tons of different developers across all different industries. Now the thing that I think is most shocking though and the biggest push back I get from a lot of people is that Typescript makes you a slower and worse developer and it's just cumbersome to deal with. But that I have always thought is not true just from my own experience. And I finally have actual proof that it's not true based on this particular research journal here. So this is the international research journal of modernization engineering technology and science. Massive mouthful but essentially what they did is they went through and they looked at projects that had exactly 10 developers. So, a team of 10 developers and a code base of over 100,000 lines of code. So, these are actual realworld projects that they're looking at for this particular analysis. And they looked at 50 different projects. So, not a massive sample size, but still relatively large. And if we look at the data they got from this, it's really interesting. This graph right here essentially shows you the four main metrics that they're looking at. And it shows you the difference between the TypeScript version and the JavaScript version. So, they compared these different projects. Some teams used pure JavaScript, some teams used pure TypeScript. And you'll notice that they're comparing the number of mistakes that were made, the time to fix different bugs, the speed of development, and the time for onboarding new developers. And all these graphs you see here are for TypeScript. So in the case of TypeScript, they had 17.3% fewer mistakes than the JavaScript developers equivalent. Same thing here with time to fix. It took them 31% less time to fix bugs than the JavaScript team took to fix bugs. They were able to develop things 18.9% faster than the JavaScript team. and they were able to onboard people 27% faster. Essentially, it took 27% less time to onboard people. So, not only was Typescript better for fixing mistakes, which is kind of what everyone already knows, but it also made it faster to fix mistakes when they came up, and it made it faster to develop new features, which is by far the biggest push back. Essentially, every single metric they looked at, TypeScript was better than JavaScript for these projects that were essentially 100,000 lines of code or more. Now, these are larger scale projects than you're going to be working on in your own day-to-day development. But I find even on small projects, it's just a few thousand lines of code. TypeScript drastically improves my experience. Not only that, but there's a separate graph inside of here that's essentially comparing three different things and showing the correlation between them because they all have a general trend. So, this is going between the different years of 2018 to 2021. And it's showing you the graph here, this top green line with 68% right here. That is the satisfaction of developers. How happy are they with development? You can see over time that has improved. You can also see this next graph, the one that says 35%, that's the percent of people using TypeScript inside their code. You can see it's a very small number over here around 20% and at the end it's around 70%. So as satisfaction improves, so does the usage of TypeScript. And finally, the amount of reduction in errors. You can see here in 2018 there was much less reduction while up here in 2021 there was a much higher reduction. So essentially it's correlating how using TypeScript not only made developers more happy but also reduced the amount of errors that they found in their code. So in essence it essentially makes your code easier to write, more enjoyable to write and it's most likely going to have less errors. Overall it's a win-winwin style situation. The next thing I like to look at is when people say, "Oh, Typescript's not that popular. It's not that cool." We'll look at React here in mpm. And if we look at the weekly downloads for React, you can see that there are 61 million weekly downloads. And everybody agrees React is incredibly popular and tons of people use it. On top of that, React is depended on by 206 almost 206,000 different libraries. So every time you download one of these libraries, it also is going to download React, which is why this weekly download number of 61 million is so high. Now let's look at the TypeScript MPM library. You can see here it has 94 almost 95 million weekly downloads. That's over 50% increase over the top of React. So TypeScript is significantly more popular than React in the form of npm downloads. And on top of that, it only has 62 63,000 dependents, which is much smaller than React. So most people that are downloading TypeScript are downloading it because they want to use it in their project and not just because it comes packaged with another package that they're already using. This is really indicative of the popularity of TypeScript. It is significantly more popular than React and it is something that pretty much every developer needs to know and going forward it becomes more and more imperative that people know TypeScript because almost every company is moving over to using TypeScript in their code. I even went ahead and I ran an analysis of essentially the top 1,000 mpm packages. And I wanted to determine which ones were JavaScript or which ones were TypeScript. And you can see here only about 12% of packages used pure JavaScript with no types at all. The other essentially 90% or 88% technically used TypeScript. They were either written purely in Typescript, which was over 50% or they had their own at taps at types library added on. So you can see about 34% of them had a types library added on to them. This is popular for something like low dash that was originally written in JavaScript a long time ago. It's popular because it's been around forever. So people added types to that library. So you can see pretty much everything on npm is written in Typescript or includes types. So the actual TypeScript ecosystem is better and more healthy than it's ever been, which is pushing more companies to write TypeScript code, pushing more developers to use TypeScript code, and overall everything is essentially moving away from pure JavaScript and over to a pure TypeScript style land. Now, if you're worried that you're falling behind because you don't already know TypeScript, and you think it's going to be some massive thing to learn, because learning JavaScript is really hard. It's really large. There's a lot to learn, I have good news for you, and that is that TypeScript is so so much easier to learn than JavaScript because you really don't need to know that much. Now, obviously, if you want to just jump start your process, you can take my TypeScript simplified course. The nice thing is is in just a couple hours, this course is not super long. So, just the first couple hours of the course, you already know 90% of the TypeScript you need to know. And then the last few hours of the course is really going to grill you on the more advanced features of TypeScript that you use in more niche situations. I use them quite often because I write complicated TypeScript code, but for most people, you don't need that super complicated code. But if you don't want to buy my course, I'm going to give you a little bit of a cheat sheet right here. What you can do is you can just go to the table of contents for my course. Look through it and that's going to kind of give you a reference of all the important things that you need to learn. Obviously, it's not going to be the video content itself, which I think is the most important, but this gives you a good starting point. If you don't actually want to purchase or can't purchase my course, I would obviously recommend the course, but of course you don't have to. So really the important things you need to learn for TypeScript, understand how you define types. This is something that you can learn incredibly quickly, especially if you have experience with another programming language that's based on types. This will come to you essentially naturally. But even if you've not used a typedbased programming language, you can probably pick up the basics of defining types in about an hour or so. It won't really take you that long. Next, learn how functions work inside of TypeScript because this is one of the most common things you're going to be typing inside of TypeScript. This won't take you very long, maybe a half hour or so. It's relatively simple. And then we can move on to different things like type modifiers. This is really useful for a little bit more advanced features inside of TypeScript. So, I'd really recommend diving into this next. Again, learning just the basics of this section won't take you very long. Maybe only 20, 30 minutes or so. So if you want to dive into some of the more advanced things like key of and type of that can take a little bit longer but for the most part this part is not too complicated. This advanced type section is essentially things that hey if you want to move on to more advanced things like generics and tupils and as const I think these are really really important things to learn but they're honestly the most confusing part of Typescript and you can get away with skipping them because 90% of the code you write does not use these. So, if you're worried about TypeScript and it's kind of overwhelming, honestly, just don't worry about generics and tupils and things like that, skip that and come back to that at a later time. Now, one of the more underrated things to learn is builtin types. I actually have a full cheat sheet that you can download. It's entirely free that goes through all of the most important TypeScript utility types with examples and explanations and everything like that. So, I'll link this in the description if you want to actually check this out. But, built-in types are one of those things most people ignore, but are incredibly useful for when you want to take your TypeScript from like a basic level to a little bit more advanced of a level. Then we get down to honestly one of the coolest parts of Typescript which is type narrowing. This is something that Typescript does automatically for you. But understanding how it works is really important and this these kinds of concepts are the things that type narrowing really excels in and these will help you kind of understand that concept. But the nice thing is since Typescript does this automatically it's not really something you need to learn. You just need to understand what it is in general and it'll just happen for you naturally. Another huge benefit for TypeScript. And then obviously I just have some like real world projects and stuff like that inside this course and like Reactbased content. doesn't really matter. But really for learning Typescript, all you need to do is learn the basics of how do you define a type and how do you define an object. Then you need to learn how do you define functions, which is overall not too complicated once you learn the basics of types. And then you can mess around with some more advanced features such as how do unions work or intersections and maybe how do you deal with some advanced things like generics and of course how do you deal with all these built-in types. You can really go as deep or shallow as you want. But the nice thing is everything you need to know about TypeScript can be learned in essentially one day. Then if you want to become more of a senior TypeScript developer that's doing some of the complicated things like generics and so on, you can take the time to learn that. It'll take much longer to learn those particular concepts. But the basics of TypeScript you can learn in a day and then after that you get all of the benefits of TypeScript. At first the projects you write are going to be slow and cumbersome. This is why people back in, you know, 2016 or so were so hesitant to use TypeScript because they're like, well, it makes me a little bit slower. I'm not sure what I'm doing. But once you get over that initial hurdle, you build your first couple small projects with TypeScript, you're going to see why everyone else has converted over to TypeScript because it makes you such a faster developer at writing code. It makes it more enjoyable to write. It's just amazing. I know when I switched from writing pure JavaScript code and started dabbling in Typescript, I was at first really frustrated because I was like, "Ah, there's so much extra code to write." But within just a few days or weeks of writing TypeScript, I was like, "Wow, the autocomplete is amazing. I can't believe how simple it is for me to fix bugs. I can't believe how easy it is to catch problems. Going from non-typed code to typesc code is absolutely mind-blowing. So, I'd highly recommend learn Typescript, even if it's just the very basics. Just learn how to define a few types, use them inside your project. You get 90% of the benefit of TypeScript with only a few hours of learning. It's truly incredible. And of course, it'll help you with landing jobs and everything like that because pure JavaScript jobs are essentially going to be completely gone over the next couple years unless you're working in an older legacy codebase. Now, I know that's a lot that I've covered, so I'd highly recommend if you want to learn TypeScript, dive into my TypeScript simplified course. It's relatively straight, simple, and it's really a quite short course. You can learn it really quickly. Or if you just want something that's entirely free, check out my TypeScript utility types after you've learned the basics of TypeScript. Those will really help you take your TypeScript code to the next level. It's entirely free and will be linked in the description for you. With that said, thank you very much for watching and have a good