Java vs javascript – who won this fight?

Let me show only numbers and bits of facts, which will make you think🤔

Finding a freelance job

Let's browse Upwork, the most popular freelancing platform in the world:

https://www.upwork.com/freelance-jobs/java/:

Now https://www.upwork.com/freelance-jobs/javascript/:

Free or commercial

Most popular JavaScript interpreters are built on top of Open-Source V8 engine are NodeJS and Chromium Browser. And both are also are Open Source, so of course are free.

Java? After 2019 – already not free. Java is owned by Oracle which asks you to pay for it. From wikipedia:

Oracle released for the legacy Java 8 LTS the last zero-cost public update in January 2019 for commercial use, although it will otherwise still support Java 8 with public updates for personal use up to at least December 2020

Yes, there is an open source Java implementation called OpenJDK, which has ~6.6k stars on GitHub:

Lets consider NodeJS stars on GitHub:

What community is bigger? If there would be some issue which community will report it and fix it faster? If you would need help which community would help you with a bigger probability?

Popularity by devices

As Java states on the installer screen "Java runs on 3 billion devices":

Probably it runs, but as we can see it is ATMs, Smartcards, POS Terminals – they all could not be programmed by most of the developers.

JavaScript runs in every modern browser which is preinstalled on almost all devices inside of the Operation Systems. According to Gartner data 2.4 billion devices were sold every year if we are talking about e.g. 2015, 2016, 2017. So image how many billion devices run JavaScript?

Plus a lot of so-called devices that "run Java" also run JavaScript in nodejs interpreter.

A lot of servers run JavaScript in nodejs environments.

Google searches

Yep, Java was pretty popular in the beginning of 200x:

Actually, we think this is also a result of a good marketing strategy which still makes you compare java with javascript.

Github popularity

Let's consider some statistics from research performed on this page: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2020/3 , results are pretty reliable, but you can check how they got it here

What do you need to run it?

To run JavaScript – if you are reading it from the desktop – open developer tools and put your javascript there.

To run Java? You need to download and properly install some runtime that is binary.

Editor conclusion

According to all trends, we see that JavaScript popularity and usage grows and we think it will grow in the future. Mentioned commercial support by Oracle made a final shot in Java language.

JavaScript is truly async language that is nowadays successfully used to build:

1. Frontends for Web Portals

2. Asynchronous high-load backends

3. Mobile applications

4. Desktop software

5. Embedded software

6. Automation scripts

JavaScript is easy to run, which makes it easy to learn, easy to use.