Python developer's perspective on learning JavaScript

Table of Contents

Introduction

I will try to explain how JavaScript looks like for a Python developer, at least from my experience. So first sight of JavaScript is welcome back to “curly braces”. Obviously I can say, it has pretty different syntax. JavaScript is known as the front-end programming language that nowadays is the most famous one.

JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks

After first touch of JavaScript, it doesn’t take much time to explore, that there are thousands or even millions of available libraries and stacks. At first people thought “What a perfect opportunity !”. After a while they understood that this is chaos. There are a lot of libraries that allow you to achieve the same goal with fewer lines of code. On this approach if you dig enough you can meet a term that is called “vanilla JavaScript”, that is writing code without
any additional frameworks / libraries.

Nevertheless, there are some of the most useful JavaScript frameworks and engines listed below with usage areas.

Front-end
- React
- Angular
- Vue
Back-end
- ExpressJs
- NextJs
Desktop apps
- Electron
Smartphone apps
- NativeScript
- React Native

Nowadays JavaScript is on the top of the most popular technologies list (e.g https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most-popular-technologies, https://githut.info). For this performance, those frameworks and engines listed above had a huge effect.

Python vs JavaScript

There are remarkable similarities with python.

Both languages have an object system based on hash tables.
They have many of the same built-in data types (numbers (floats), strings, arrays).
Python’s list and JavaScript array are almost the same.
Both languages are dynamically typed and can be used interactively.

There are also remarkable differences with python.

Python is slow to run comparatively to JavaScript.
Python is strongly typed while JavaScript is weakly typed. This means type conversion has to be explicit in Python and implicit in JavaScript. In practice python will throw TypeError in most cases but in JavaScript type-related mistakes don’t crash the program. So as a consequence of this difference JavaScript debugging might be very challenging.
Python has a large standard library, while JavaScript has no standard library but instead has millions of poorly implemented third-party libraries.
Both languages utilize different inheritance models.

Besides that, there are a lot of new things for python programmers like “DOM”, “render process” and so on.