In March of 2013, Matt Mullenweg stopped by the Memeburn office to talk about how WordPress went from being just another blogging platform to becoming the CMS of choice for the majority of the web. The author of the article infers that Mullenweg thinks 90% of WordPress development will be JavaScript based in the next few years.
In the future, the platform will also feature a lot more JavaScript. In fact, he reckons that 90% of WordPress will be JavaScript-based within the next few years.
When Eric Lewis recently asked Mullenweg on Twitter if he said the quote, his response clarified that he thinks the majority of PHP will be used for infrastructure such as updates, API’s, and the database layer. Meanwhile, user-facing improvements will be JavaScript driven. Most already are such as the editor, media, customizer and menus.
@nacin @ericandrewlewis I'd agree with @nacin – 1/ Infrastructure stuff will likely remain majority PHP (updates, APIs, auth, DB layer)
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) June 7, 2014
@nacin @ericandrewlewis 2/ Most interesting user-facing improvements will be JS-driven, most already are. (editor, media, customizer, menus)
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) June 7, 2014
Spurred on by the discussion, Jordi Cabot of NelioSoftware.com dove into the WordPress source code. Using graphs, Cabot shows how many JavaScript files and lines of code have been added to WordPress since 0.7 was released. He then compares the number of PHP and JavaScript lines within the source code.
The numbers show that JavaScript is only 16.6% of the total source code of WordPress with PHP representing 83.4%. So while JavaScript isn’t taking over WordPress development any time soon, it’s definitely a valuable skill worth knowing.
@photomatt @nacin @ericandrewlewis Amazing how the web has gone from "just say no to javascript!" – to – "we need more javascript!"
— Greg Rickaby (@GregRickaby) June 7, 2014
Like Greg Rickaby, I find it fascinating that JavaScript has seen a resurgence. At one point, JavaScript seemed to be one of those poisonous things on the web that caused nothing but problems for browsers.
I think various libraries like MooTools, jQuery, and Node.js are largely responsible for the renewed interest in the language. I also think the introduction of Ajax played a role as well, going back to 2004 when Google used it for Gmail and then Google Maps. Neil Taylor of Myplanet.io has a great article covering the brief history of the JavaScript language.
What factors can you come up with that explain the renewed interest in JavaScript? What advice would you give people wanting to learn JavaScript?
“What advice would you give people wanting to learn JavaScript?”
I would recommend learning about object oriented programming (OOP). Once I learned what that was all about, everything (not just JavaScript) made a lot more sense. Knowing those concepts makes it really easy to learn new libraries like jQuery, YUI3, Backbone, etc. quickly, which is almost a must these days as it seems like new libraries are coming out quicker than you can learn them!