The one stat that made me rethink learning JavaScript first

I was looking through Stack Overflow's developer survey from last year, just killing time, and found out that something like 60% of people who code say they started with JavaScript, but a huge portion of them switch to Python within their first 2 years. That surprised me because every beginner tutorial pushes JS like it's the only option. I started with Python myself back in March because a friend who does data stuff kept saying it's easier to read, and honestly I thought I was missing out on "real" coding. But seeing that stat made me feel less weird about my choice. There's a chart in the survey that shows the drop-off rate between languages people start with versus what they stick with, and JS has one of the biggest gaps. Has anyone else noticed that the whole "start with JavaScript" advice might be outdated, or is it still the right call for beginners?

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ben20616d ago

Been reading a few threads about this on Reddit too and the pattern keeps coming up. What a lot of people say is that JS makes you fight the tooling before you even understand the basics, like you are learning npm and frameworks at the same time as loops. Python lets you just open a file and run it, so the early wins come faster and you stick with it. The survey gap you mentioned probably shows that more than anything else, people bail on JS because they got stuck in setup hell, not because the language itself is bad. JS is still the right call if your goal is websites, since you need it for the browser no matter what. But for pure learning, starting with Python and picking up JS later seems to work for most folks.

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