Kick-Starting With JS
06 Sep 2019
JavaScript is one of those bosses in a video game that I’ve encountered in the past, got beaten badly, then decided to go through the rest of the game avoiding. I had prior experience with the language when I learned about web development in my early high school years. However, learning JavaScript back then was a sour experience for me that had stuck for many years until the Fall semester of 2019. After being reintroduced to JavaScript in my software engineering course, my perspective on the language has positively changed.
The first time I encountered JavaScript was in my freshmen year of high school. I was interested in learning how to develop my own websites for personal projects. It was difficult for me to catch on to the language because I’ve been accustomed to lower-level languages such as C and x86 assembly. Developing a simple blog with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was a challenging task that resulted in failure. Although I learned the basics of JavaScript, I resented web development up until this day.
After experiencing ICS 314 for a couple weeks, I learned a few new aspects of JavaScript, and my perspective of the language has changed. The ES6 JavaScript exercises on freecodecamp.org taught me several new characteristics of the language. For example, the spread operator is a very powerful feature that I wasn’t familiar with. It allowed me to easily copy the contents of an array to a new one. Furthermore, my attitude towards JavaScript changed as I practiced with it. JavaScript is unique among the most popular programming languages such as Python, C, and Java. It implements a lot of high-level features that would be valuable in development. I believe that it’s a very convenient programming language with a strong community. In my opinion, community is crucial to software engineering. Community support is important because I can access a wide variety of libraries and frameworks to use. Although wev development is different, JavaScript deserves a second chance from me because it’s a really powerful language that’s rich with features and a strong community.