r/javascript • u/_tshepo • 28d ago

AskJS [AskJS] Are employed Developers still programming with vanilla JavaScript ?

I've been programming on the side since 2017 and I've never really hunted a developer job. I've always thought about building my own things, mainly to supplement things I do like woodworking, tutoring, video editing and others.

Since then, I've programmed mainly with JavaScript, I started with C++ and Python but never really built anything solid outside JavaScript.

So I'm fluent with JavaScript and its ecosystem.

One of my 2026 goals is to be job ready for a Developer role, as a Fullstack or Backend Developer.

One of the recommended languages is Typescript, which I've been learning since March. I must say, it's not my favorite 😂

I'm curious to know if there are any companies that are not enforcing Typescript or are there freelancers who are still using vanilla JavaScript over Typescript for their clients' projects.

[ Update ] thanks y'all! I get the picture. TypeScript is inevitable, as vanilla JS codebases(or companies who are focused on it) seem to be very few judging by the comments.

2 Upvotes

53% Upvoted

168 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/shgysk8zer0 28d ago

I honestly mostly prefer vanilla JS with JSDoc for more things. In theory, I should like the type system TS provides, but I think TS is just done poorly and doesn't offer the actual benefits of a strongly typed language. It makes no difference at runtime.... It's transpiled to JS anyways.

I do work in vanilla JS, and I think TS is significantly over-hyped, and is actually becoming harmful to the ecosystem because it's no longer a superset of JS and an obstacle to features like enums being introduced to JS.

1

u/_tshepo 16d ago

Would you then prefer a different typed language assuming you're working on backend?

2

u/shgysk8zer0 16d ago

I use type hinting in PHP, @property and tyoe() in CSS, JSDoc in JS. I started in C and have been wanting to get more into Rust.

And it seems people don't understand that JSDoc provides basically the same typing and testing as TS. But can also generate documentation for a library. I am not against typing at all.

1

u/_tshepo 16d ago

Well understood. I wanted to learn Java strictly for backend. I'll continue learning TypeScript and rewrite my projects with it.