 Alright. And we are live. Thank you so much everybody for joining us today. My name is Rachel and I'm with the OpenJS Foundation. And today I'm really excited about the panel that we have lined up today. So back in 2019, before everything changed, we held this panel in Montreal at our global event. And we talked all about JavaScript trends and what 2020 had to offer. At that time, nobody knew what was in store for us. And so we thought it would be interesting and fun to bring back that panel and talk about where 2020 brought us and where we hit the mark, where we missed the mark, and then also what's to come in 2021. So with that, I am going to hand it over to our moderator, Nick Nisi, who's going to introduce the panel and get things kicked off. Nick, over to you. Thanks, Rachel. So yeah, you did a lot of setting the stage there, which is great, so that I don't have to because I don't have a stage because of the pandemic. So that's why we're all meeting on Zoom like this, to reconvene this panel on JavaScript trends in 2020. And like you said, I'm Nick Nisi and I moderated the panel in 2019 at Node.js Interactive in Montreal. And I was joined there and I'm joined now by Alex Williams. Alex, welcome back. Thank you. And also Liz Parity. Liz, welcome back as well. Hi. Thank you. Happy to be here. Very excited to have all of you here. And last but not least, Chris, in a check that I didn't check with you beforehand. No worries. Let's go with Chris Anizek. But yeah, great to be here. Obviously not as nice as Montreal, but we'll take it. We'll take it being at home. Yeah, for sure. Well, it's the personalities and all of the personalities here. So I think it'll still be amazing. So let's just start right off with a happy note, a very happy note, because while 2020 was a pretty tough year for a lot of different reasons, there were a lot of positive things that happened in 2020 relating to JavaScript and the JavaScript ecosystem. So what are some of those things that happened? Well, I always say that one of the biggest things that happened in the JavaScript ecosystem was that NPM was acquired by GitHub. That was a very big thing. And GitHub is owned by Microsoft. I haven't seen a huge change in NPM. There's not a revolutionary thing. They have removed added something great. I think NPM has kept its status cool. And I think there's something really good. I think that benefits the ecosystem. So that's the huge thing that happened. And I would say also that there were important releases like NPM 7, Firmium or Node.js 14 was released. And not so technical stuff, but also happy stuff that happened in 2020 related to the developer world. And the programming world was that working for home has a lot of good things. There's bad things too, but we're going to focus on the good things, including flexibility. There's a lot of work, life balance. We save money, saving, commuting. I hate commuting. That's why I've been working remotely for five years because I don't like to be in traffic. So location independence, positive environmental impact. So there was a lot of good things, technology and not technology that happened in 2020. And I'm very happy that you opened the panel with this question. So we start with a happy note. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of taking a step back to the first thing that you mentioned, which was GitHub acquiring NPM. And one of the things that we kind of highlighted in the 2019 panel was the influence that Microsoft has on the JavaScript world. And so back then, they had acquired GitHub at that time. And so pretty much all of the world's open source code lives on GitHub. And if you look at the typical JavaScript developer, they're using Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor to write their JavaScript. And just from there, they're controlling a lot of the pieces of the ecosystem. And now, if you want to install any kind of JavaScript, you're going to be using NPM. And that is now owned by GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. So they have continued their benevolent reign of the JavaScript world. And you did mention that things have not changed too much with regard to NPM. And Chris, what do you think? Do you think that's a good thing? I've always kind of been impressed with the new Microsoft. They've definitely have changed over the years. And one of the kind of nice things that has happened is, I do think they've been a great steward at NPM, but they've also launched a new service called GitHub Packages, which kind of supports not only Node and NPM related artifacts, but also other things. So I think we've kind of benefited from lots of more feature velocity on GitHub and just, I think, better tools for developers. And I think Microsoft has been a fairly good steward, even though I'm forever suspicious of things. But overall, I think it's been a lot of goodness. Definitely, absolutely. And yeah, so there's been a lot of that. I do think that keeping the status quo with regard to NPM is very good. They did release NPM 7, which had some changes. A particular note is supporting auto-installing peer dependencies. And they also support yarn.lockfiles. And yarn is a competitor to NPM in terms of the CLI, but it still uses NPM as the repository, if I recall. So what else happened in 2020? Alex, do you have any ideas or any thoughts about some positive notes from 2020? Well, from our point of view, we look at it in terms of there seems to be a new resurgence and interest in web architectures overall. And JavaScript is a deep part of that story. And we look to advancements, such as what we're seeing, for instance, in the Jamstack community is one example of that. We're seeing more interest in web components overall. So we're seeing an interest in... There's a new project, for instance, from Google called the Polymer Project. That's reflected with that. And I think we can't ignore projects such as Dino. And as well, the continued interest in TypeScript. And TypeScript, we were all commenting on its very interesting rise in the red-bonk rankings. And James Governor said, perhaps we'll see the day when we'll see a one-two, JavaScript one and TypeScript two. But in the meantime, TypeScript has just jumped way up. Vulnerabilities are still... I think that real concern that people have about thinking more about their API endpoints. And how do you protect those? Because I think a lot of people might have just said, well, APIs are awesome, but didn't really think about as much how they're exposed. And I think that relates to a lot of the issues that we see in the JavaScript community. I was just... I think there was a bug, a zero-day bug that was announced by Google in Chrome, as I understand. I'd have to look it up. But yeah, Google Chrome zero-day has afflicted Windows and Mac users. That's one headline I see. So that's kind of a roundup of my thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a good tie into our next topic, which is security. And that is something that you were saying in 2019 would be an existential crisis for the JavaScript community or will continue to be. And you just highlighted a bunch of areas where that definitely is still true. And there are a lot of that. But as I think back to 2020 and what happened in there, I can't really recall anything major beyond some of those typical browser zero days. I think a lot of it probably got drowned out by things like the SolarWinds attack, which wasn't really JavaScript's fault, thankfully. But what other things have we seen in regards to security and the JavaScript community in 2020? Well, I would have to ask Chris, for instance, if he's seen anything reflected in the work that he's seen being done. I mean, it seems like JavaScript has just not been as much of a news item generally in this year. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's just an example of that boring state that I think we talked about in 2019. It's interesting where, while you're speaking, I'm trying to Google around because at least in cloud native land, there seems to be security incidents pop up. People like crypto jacking or crypto miner things. I would be surprised if the JavaScript community wasn't hit by folks trying to somehow miner do something elicit, potentially, with crypto. I mean, we've done some research at the Linux Foundation that we published a little bit late last year about the problem of what are truly the most widely used packages in different open source programming language communities, not only Java and Go, but JavaScript. JavaScript was highlighted where, if I recall, you could always look at downloads as a metric, but that's not necessarily telling you the full story behind the scenes of packages being used by companies. We actually partnered with a couple SCA vendors out there to get some data from them to expose what's actually being used behind the firewall. I remember some of the JavaScripts, JavaScript's a very unique community where people create, I don't know, is array package. It's a one-liner and you're just cool. It sounds super useful. But there's a lot of packages. I think in particular it was Minimist and maybe Lowdash. There was a couple of them that was top 10 most widely used. Then you look at it and it's like, they haven't had a release in over a year. Does that mean they're super stable or no one's paying attention anymore? This is not good. No one's responding to any security issues. I think we highlighted a lot of those issues in that report, at least in the JavaScript community, where there's a lot of widely used packages that seem to work but they're not really actively maintained. A lot of that could come down to how do you maintain a one-line package? It may not change too much. It's a security issue maybe. I think, yeah, as Chris mentioned, I think most of the vulnerabilities are in NPM and the packages. But I would like to talk about not only JavaScript but the security programming world in general. I was reading a risk-based security magazine and it was saying that the number of records of data exposed in 2020, like in general, the data exposed was 36 billion in 2020. It's like 36 billion is such a huge number. To compare it, there's 8 billion people in the world. It's a lot of security breaches everywhere. It was actually called the worst year on record. 2020 apparently had a lot of major security breaches in the programming world. If I can think of, I remember the biggest attack. It was very incredible. It was the attack on Twitter. I don't know if you remember that at all. But it was basically three teenagers that attacked most of the famous people on the planet, like Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Big Gays, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Kim Kardashian. All the Twitter accounts and they were like scamming people for Bitcoin. It was just crazy to see that. I'm mentioning this because I'm sure Twitter uses JavaScript somehow. But this attack was not like a social attack. I don't know because there were these three teenagers just asked employees for Twitter like, hey, can you give me access to this? And they gave them access. That was more like a social intelligence attack than, yeah. So that was fun to see. I mean, it was not funny. It was like, yeah. It was really a good reminder that it doesn't matter really what programming language or stack you're using. People are always going to be the weakest link in the security chain. You really have to train that aspect of your organization as well. And I think it's always, yeah. And it's always advisable to, there is like two things, two components on security. One is to have like prevention, like for example, always use two factor authentications or everything for most of the thing. And the second part would be to like to have the detection capabilities to rapidly react like the red button, to press the red button. If there is an attack on your software or in JavaScript or your application, like to rapidly shut that down or try to fix it or whatever, like it makes a big difference. So I think security is composed by those two parts, prevention and rapidly like reaction of possible attacks. Yeah, absolutely. And one kind of major piece kind of bringing it back to maybe more JavaScript slash MPM specific issues was one thing that we were seeing a lot in 2020 is kind of supply chain hacks or supply chain attacks where you can kind of squat on a package name or an organization name in MPM that looks like maybe something that's extremely popular, maybe a very popular company and then publish a lot of malicious packages to that. And the problem is that I think it kind of goes to MPM being so like if you look at your dependency tree for any small project even the dependency tree is not something that you're just going to quickly have a glance at and make sure everything's okay. It's very, very deep sometimes and there's a lot of packages that you just have no idea why they're there or what brought them in, but they're there. And so there were some research where researchers actually created some official looking packages, published some malicious code that quote unquote malicious that just reached out to their DNS servers and hit them saying, yeah, we're installed somewhere. And, you know, they got a lot of hits on that because it's something that you don't think of too much and you don't, if you don't really take the time to analyze it can really sneak in there and wreak havoc on your system or on your application for your users, which is very scary. Turning the conversation just a little bit, let's turn back to another topic that we discussed in 2019. And that was diversity and inclusion. So we brought up, we talked about this a lot on stage at the conference and kind of the bottom line that we left with there was that there's been a lot of good progress, but we still have a long way to go as a community to make things more inclusive for everyone. And this might be a little bit tougher to talk about given that we've all just kind of been, you know, sitting in our basements for the last year. But what, if anything, have you seen as changing it to or progressing towards that goal of a more diverse and inclusive culture in JavaScript in 2020? I would, I would just say that, I mean, I don't think it's any surprise that, you know, there really hasn't been much change. And I think it's actually been worse for women and underrepresented minorities, especially women. And, you know, Liz and others can speak to this, but, you know, most, you know, a lot of women have kids. And they have to take care of their kids when they're home. And that can be that that's a that's a responsibility I always have historically. And I don't think it's changed. I think one of the things that I, you know, I'm looking for kind of, I'm looking for resilience really is what that that's that's what I'm always looking for these days, like, who has resilience? And, you know, and what is resilience? And, and I see a lot of resilience in the communities of women who are developers. And, and, and I so appreciate that. And it just shows how hard they have to work, just to get, you know, just to stay even, I mean, so much harder than I have to work. And, you know, and I just so respect, you know, that aspect of the community, where I mean, I cover Kubernetes, I've covered the Kubernetes community, you know, quite a bit. And, and that's what I see there. I mean, I see there, you know, a real tight-knit group of women who are actually, you know, without doubt leaders there. And, and I, and, and that's what I just hope to continue to see in the JavaScript community is, is, you know, maybe they don't have, women don't have the numbers, but they certainly are, they certainly show communities all about. And, you know, and their leadership is critical. Yeah, I, I agree with Alex. I think in 2018, we were like in a positive note, it was like, yeah, there is a lot of work to be done, but we're working on this, there's company working on this, there's like a lot of communities working on this, so maybe in 2020 we'll improve, but then nobody could predict 2020, like. So I think it actually, unfortunately, has gotten worse, the inclusion because the inclusion and diversity in general, because also about what Alex mentioned, like women take care of the kids and not only that, like finding jobs and in general, like for women is like a little bit harder, also for people, like underrepresented minorities, Black people, trans people, like it's super hard. And it's not only the pandemic, it's also like a change in culture, like there is a big cultural stuff underneath that it needs to be addressed. I was reading an article before years ago about the United Nations in the women, if the women gets paid more or equal to men, like there was some studies that they were saying that the world in general would be better because women knows how to invest better, maybe in education or in things for the kids or in things that can make society a little bit better. So at the end, inclusion is super important to have a very world, like I mentioned in 2019 that people that are creating software and technology in general are creating the future and we want a future that is inclusive. So unfortunately, the pandemic and 2020, I think it didn't help at all for the inclusion. Let's hope why it turns out in 2021. I think, yeah, there's a lot of work to be done, but I'm sure companies and communities can help. The 2020 was a crazy year overall. I think one silver lining is I do think the emphasis of virtual events have at least made it a little bit more inclusive for people to attend all over the world geographically, which historically not everyone could go fly to Montreal for the open jazz event. And I think to end maybe with a little bit more positive note is I think in the future, almost all events will have a virtual or hybrid type model. So I think in the future, hopefully that makes SIGs a little bit more inclusive for people to attend all over, regardless of all the systemic issues that are in society about women and others that kind of face issues. So maybe that's a silver lining at least for us. We've seen our attendance from countries and other geographies that generally you never attend a KubeCon show up at an event. And hopefully that's been at least a similar case in open jazz. But I think everyone's just been distracted the last year so investments. I mean one small thing that we did at least in CNCF is there's kind of a saying like if you don't measure it, like how are you going to potentially change things? So we've started to publish in our annual reports at least the kind of diversity makeup of our staff, of the technical leadership and so on. So at least it throws out a benchmark to kind of look at to see how we could kind of gauge and improve ourselves over time. And we historically haven't done that, at least within our community. I know the jazz community tends to be a little bit more progressive on that front. But yeah, just an idea. Yeah, absolutely. I think in general, like companies and individuals are more aware of diversity. Like people are taking, like they're more conscious about it. But there's like it's still a lot of work to be done. But for example, it was a good thing to see that a lot of companies and a lot of projects were they were renaming the branch, the main branch from master to main. And there's like small changes in languages to be more inclusive that it helps a little bit. So you start with the little steps and then it creates like snowball. And now, yeah, so so there's also good things that I'm not, yeah, I'm not saying that, oh, it was so horrible for diversity, but but it's still a lot of room for improvements. Like last year, I asked how many women were in the room, and they were like five or six women. It was like hundreds of people. So and it's always like that. And people of color or minorities, there's always like very little. So so yeah, I hope these change somewhere near in the future. Yeah, absolutely. And kind of relating to conferences. I do think that one good thing that comes out of the the year that we've had is, you know, conferences have gotten remote or gone remote so we can have more people joining. And usually they're, you know, cheaper or maybe free depending on the conference. So it's much more approachable. The same thing with like meetups. So meetups have gone online. And as an example, I attended a VIM meetup from Berlin. And I was just like everyone else because everybody else was just remote. I wasn't just kind of, you know, the guy on the TV over in the corner. I was I felt like I was there and present with everyone. So that's really cool being able to kind of have everyone on an equal footing, remotely joining and learning together. And that also like we've we've had this rush towards remote work and remote life. And that may be sticking around beyond the pandemic, which is a good thing, because I do think it opens up the ability for a more diverse hiring pool. So you can hire from geographically diverse places as well. And it really lets you find the talent that you want and need that maybe isn't willing to to relocate to the Bay Area. So that's that's good. So yeah, I think that those are all great things that happened from this. But I think kind of the big takeaway was there was, you know, maybe maybe some baby steps with that. And it's not every every lifetime, I guess, that we get some kind of life changing event that affects everyone. And the biggest takeaway from that is it doesn't affect everyone the same. Everyone's going through it. But it did disproportionately affect women and people of color minorities in different ways. And so it is that's something to be mindful of as we go into 2021. And hopefully a post pandemic world say about that. So moving on to our next topic, let's talk about the low code or no code movement. And do you think that this is a response to the complexity of the web today? Alex, you want to take the first first shot at that? Oh, definitely. And, you know, as we see over time with JavaScript, it, you know, it had some early evolution. And it's been pretty major straight across the board in terms of its dominance for the past several years. But it hasn't changed the complexity for how to for how to use it. And now with the browser being such a critical part of, you know, of any web application, really, you're starting to see just, you know, just a deeper level of complexity that's that's required. I don't know a lot about WebAssembly, but I'm curious on how that's going to affect the landscape over time. And, and then also when you're also thinking about TypeScript, you know, TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. And so that adds another level of complexity that you need to think about. So there's, there's no doubt that the no code movement has muscle, but it doesn't seem to have the muscle that really you need for the complexities that we see in the architecture is that developers are building. So in low code, I had one experience that really impacted me. So basically, low code is like, if I I was reading, it says that it's basically a visual way to code. And he's very friendly for beginners and for kids and all that. And I want to share experience I met and the last JSConf Colombia, we did like a couple of years ago, there was a kid, like he was 12 years old, and he was coding in front of 500 people from in a scratch. There was like this is very popular, like this game scratch. And then when you just move blocks, and you start creating like code, and there's, and I think it was fantastic to see kids that and also in in Montreal, 2019, we see this little girl like Ellie, Ellie, and she was also coding with robots. And I think low code, low code, definitely, it helps a lot like beginners, he helps a lot of kids because he makes it fun, he makes it entertaining. I can weigh my knees to be eight years old to show her this and to put her like, you know, I think it's actually great. And I think it definitely, in my opinion, is definitely like, for complexity, it helps to solve the complexity of software because software can be very complex. So if I'm like a little girl, a little boy doing my similar programming, and I see like code is straight away is like, what is this? But if I see colors and numbers and maybe games and trees and little things all over, I think that would be definitely be more fun. It's easier. And there's, I have seen web pages and things built with low code. So I think it's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, it really helps businesses or users get ideas from just an idea into, you know, maybe a, at this time, like a simple prototype or a simple MVP of what they actually want to do. And it's a really easy way to do that without having to learn a lot of code. And from just a learning standpoint, like you said, for kids, you know, without getting into the semantics and getting bogged down and all of like the logic of the how a code, a program is structured, you know, if statements, all these blocks, scoping, things like that, it just lets you focus on thinking logically. And if this happens, then this should happen. Otherwise, this should happen. And kind of going through that flow, it's a really easy way to, to learn the mentality behind coding without really diving into complex code. And then that can translate into JavaScript, Perl, like any language. Yeah, you know, the fundamentals, like the fundamentals, and that's the fundamentals, like if a statement or whatever, that if you learn the basics, later, like it would be so much easier to code. So I really like low code. Absolutely. That's great. And from a low code standpoint, like having a little bit of code, another piece that that might be kind of taking the world by storm is the jam stack, which might be kind of low, low back end code for front end developers. Chris, what are your thoughts on jam stack? Is it, is it a thing? I mean, like from a personal usage perspective, like, you know, we use a lot of Netlify, I personally use a lot of Netlify, but I haven't kind of, you know, explored other aspects of kind of the jam stack to kind of truly make it useful to maybe like replace an existing, you know, application, I don't know, like, like an old blog or something and the jam stack equivalent and so on. So I mean, I think it is a, I think it is a thing we are seeing kind of a bit of usage within our kind of cloud native ecosystem, but it's still very like nascent from, from my perspective. I do think there's a lot of potential. Basically, any technology that simplifies the developer experience makes it easier to use and be productive, I think is going to is going to do well, especially if you're not like required to learn a new type of programming language and developer experience is nailed. And I think that's what jam stack is trying to do by taking advantage of the huge JavaScript ecosystem by also, and also trying to offer kind of a unique kind of serverless type offering for, you know, developers, so they don't kind of have to deal with all the, all the stuff, but definitely a lot of innovation. You're seeing a lot of companies doing jam stack offerings, I think just this week, like Cloudflare announced like their pages thing is like out of beta now, which is kind of a jam stack based offering, Netlify continues to grow. I think you'll see more and more clouds offered jam stack style solutions, which will in turn increase adoption. But I think the jam stack is focused on the right aspect of making it easy, like making it easier for developers to actually be, you know, effective. So jam stack is getting a lot of attention from us in our coverage of the space. Richard McManus has been writing a lot about jam stack. And there's been some interesting stories about, you know, what jam stack represents. And Matt Billman, who's one of the founders of, of, you know, Netlify calls basically the, the browser, the, you know, a, you know, a new runtime really. And for him, you know, I think he definitely has a vested interest in it, but I think that says a lot about kind of just the power of the browser and, you know, the role that JavaScript plays in that, you know, you can really begin enhancing the user experience, you know, that have increasingly been capable through JavaScript engines, you know, like open source VA from Google, Matt talks about that. And there's so many powerful browser APIs to enable services. And, you know, you can do local caching, location services, identity services. There's so much you can do. And, and, and so I can't see why, you know, jam stack would slow down at all, especially with the serverless, you know, story to start unfold from there. But that's going to put, that's going to bring the complexity somewhere. I mean, I think that's, that's the big question. Where does that complexity go? And, you know, and, and that's the question I think, you know, is, is one to ask, you know, what does that do for actually the overall complexity itself? Yeah, absolutely. I think that they, it kind of builds layers on top of that complexity. So it makes things more approachable to me as a self proclaimed front end developer. I can really take, take charge of an entire stack by not needing to learn how to properly configure a web server and a database. And, you know, all of that stuff, it can all just be wrapped up into an AWS like offering. And then I can just learn how to work with within their stack. And then that is itself super complex. So then I can work on a layer on top of that with like, you know, Netlify functions and things like that where it's just exposing in a simpler way the things that I want. And so I can build more of the application by myself and have a better understanding of it and an easier way to talk about and to share that with others without having to worry about all of the minutia of actually getting it running. It's just allowing me to focus on my, my business goals or my product goals and get it there without all of that, which is, which is really pretty cool. So I do like that part of the, the no code or low code movement, as we say, and it does seem like, go ahead. I was going to say it does seem like we are seeing a lot of that. We've mentioned Netlify as being a big Jamstack, big in the Jamstack space. There's also, you know, like Gatsby, which is like a more full-fledged solution for developing like an application, a web application in like a fully enclosed environment. And then we have other ones like Vercel, which is, you know, the, it provides the, the backend and the tooling that you need for, for that serverless component, but then it has specialized tooling like Next that allows you to develop with like server-side rendering and things like that. So it really takes advantage of the prescribed stack that they, that they have and allows you to do more with that right off the bat. Yeah. I think Jamstack is great because of several reasons. It provides like a very developer experience, performance, security, especially lower cost and greater scalability. And it's successful because of two terms, basically. One is pre-rendering, which means that everything is already rendered. So when a user makes a request, it doesn't have to go to a database, I'm going to answer. So because sites can be just served directly from CDN. So it's super fast and cheap. But as you said, there's a lot of great tools like Gatsby, Netlify, Next.js that are using Jamstack. And so I think it's going to definitely be increasing. But at the same time, it's important to take into account that Jamstack has a few problems because sites are great as long as they're built with text and images, explicitly because Jamstack is for static content because everything is pre-rendered, right? So as soon as your site requires like dynamic features, it gets potentially a little bit more difficult. It has like more problems. Another problem is that if you want to take content or small changes, it has to be by coding and it has to pre-render the whole site again. And another problem I found is like it relies heavily on third parties and also API. So for example, if your API on a third party goes down, your site will probably go down as well. So at the end, Jamstack has a lot of great things, but it also has it's not so good things. So as always, it depends on what you need. So if you need like a static site with a lot of text, images, for example, a big e-commerce, blog post or note.dev, which is a site we created in NodeService for NodeJS news. So Jamstack is absolutely great. But if you need like a huge application with a lot of dynamic content, very complex architecture, you might need something else. So for me, it always depends. Like I think it's increasing and it has a lot of value, but yeah, it also has like not good things that people maybe need something else. There was a little bit of a turf war at the end of last year between Matt Billman and Matt Mullenweg, Jamstack compared to WordPress. And you know, and Matt's point is that, you know, WordPress now taps into many of the same front-end technologies that Jamstack does that it has a it has a REST API that Matt says is awesome, a GraphQL API. And you know, you can use it decoupled. There are things like he talks about front-end that allows you to build WordPress with servers pre-rendered using React. There's just a lot of ways to do integrations. And so yeah, I mean, the big issue I've had, I mean, I was like, I fell in love with these static platforms several years ago when I was considering what to use for, you know, our content management system. And I'm like, I don't I think I would spend like 95% of my time teaching, you know, teaching people how to use, use an editor, you know, with a static site, just, you know, and so just was like, just not doable. So for developers, I think it's fine. It goes back to that, you know, no code part of the world, probably where I'm more high morphin in. But, you know, I mean, I think there's a lot that it just kind of shows almost like the similarities, but real kind of like complexities that come when you're trying to choose between these platforms. I mean, for developers, I think, you know, Jamstack's great. I just don't know about for everyone else. Yeah. And I do think that that friendly, I'll call it a fight, but the friendly fight between the mats and, you know, WordPress versus the Jamstack, I do think that that lends a lot of goodwill and goodwill to the ideas of the Jamstack, because there are a lot of those features being built into WordPress, which does power like 30% of the Internet or something like that. And giving them a road to get to those Jamstack ideas while still staying, you know, within the comfortable WordPress platform and the CMS that they're used to is really powerful and really speaks a lot to the ideas that that is a focus for that community. So kind of to change topics a little bit, I wanted to get to one more question before we kind of wrap up here. And that's just getting talking about JavaScript itself. So JavaScript is it's continuing to lead. I think we have a slide to show with some language stats. And that shows that for the past several years, JavaScript has just been the number one language. And that's why we're here talking about it. It's obviously a language that we really like. And it's something that really no matter what language or what kind of developer you you claim to be, if your product or your app touches the Internet or the web in any way, you probably have JavaScript in there too. So it's just kind of an add on to every other language, which is pretty cool. But do we see that trend continuing? Do we see anything shaking this line going into 2021 and beyond? Well, I think we should give Redmond credit. They've been doing this since 2012. And they've been citing TypeScript. And that's to me the most interesting aspect of this data here. I mean, look at that TypeScript line. I mean, look at that ascent. I mean, and it just keeps going up and up and up and up. And I think it reached into the top, it did reach into the top 10 this year and it surpassed Ruby. Yeah, it's number eight. JavaScript is number one, meaning, I don't know how to do math, but that would make JavaScript number 18. It's in the first and eighth spot, because TypeScript is just a superset of JavaScript. So it's extremely cool seeing that. And I think there's some other things to look at. I mean, Java dropped, and that gave Python, has given the Python the opportunity to rise up to the top there. I think we were talking about in another call how Python is perceived as a little bit easier to use than JavaScript. So I think that's something we'll be something to look at. And now, I think there was a question from the crowd about AI and JavaScript. And Python has been reigning supreme in the data science community. And so that's something I'd be curious to look at is how the JavaScript plays in this space in comparison to Python. Yeah. And I think that that does kind of speak to what might unseat JavaScript is, would it be something like a wasm-compiled language or WebAssembly? Would it be something that runs in the browser? It would obviously have to be something that runs in the browser, to get past JavaScript, I think at this point. But could a WebAssembly language do that? Or would it be something like TypeScript where it's still just JavaScript, but it's still the JavaScript that you're familiar with, but with some additional types bolted on? And how would, how are tools changing to grow with this environment where we have this ability to, to develop kind of with other languages? Well, I think TypeScript, as we see, is obviously like going, growing up a lot, incredibly. Even in 2019, I said TypeScript is going to grow a lot. That was a good prediction I have, but I couldn't predict anything else. But I don't think TypeScript will replace or overcome or overbrund like JavaScript. I think JavaScript will always be, for many, many years more to come, will always be the first one, for example. And I think maybe at some point, the language itself, JavaScript itself, are going to adapt some things that from TypeScript. So for example, what happened with CoffeeScript? Like CoffeeScript, we used to be very popular, but then JavaScript like adapted things from CoffeeScript and CoffeeScript died. So if that happens, like JavaScript is start, the language itself is start getting like, adapting things from TypeScript. Maybe TypeScript is going to die. So we don't know. But I don't think TypeScript is going to be bigger than JavaScript sometimes. Like maybe, maybe that won't happen. And yeah, I think JavaScript will be the number one for many, many more years to come. Yeah, definitely. I think that one thing that might be, that JavaScript might be taking a hit on right now is performance. And it seems like a lot of, even JavaScript tooling is being rewritten in other languages, like Go and Rust, because of the perceived performance increases that you get from that, just in terms of like, you know, bundling a site or things like that, things like ES Build, which is written in Go, take advantage of that speed to really accelerate development workflows. So do you think that that speed of writing things in JavaScript could hinder it going forward as like an option for writing tooling? Chris, I'm going to throw, I'm going to be the one that throws it to you. I mean, people are always going to rewrite, you know, software and take advantage of anything faster, you know, down the line, or even seeing that within our community, where the majority of stuff is in Go lang. And, you know, there's kind of this odd fascination with new and shiny things, you know, things like Rust, you know, Rust as a part of language that also has kind of very unique performance characteristics compared to, you know, Go lang, you know, so we're seeing it now where a lot of our tools are, you know, people are joking, oh, we're going to rewrite this in Rust, because it's a little bit faster and better to maintain. So, I mean, it'll be interesting. I think, you know, it truly depends kind of, you know, languages sometimes have their own unique niches and so on. You know, it's very rare to kind of see something like that's truly maybe general purpose. You know, I think, you know, to Alex's point, Python seems to have carved out a niche for very beginner friendly and also kind of dominates the kind of data science, AI, ML side of the house, you know, JavaScript, obviously, front end, but also a little bit of back end with Node and so on. But, you know, on the back end, sometimes people are look at other things, right? You know, like Rust and Go. So, I think, you know, over time, like, people are going to use all multiple things. And, you know, I think it's truly going to depend on how easy, you know, the language is for its kind of general purpose and wide usage overall. So, I don't know if that really answers the question too much, but like, you know, what are kids, what are kids like first programming language, right? Like, is it JavaScript? No, I think mostly Python is probably where a lot of folks start out at least at university. I think they're going to start right up with a WebAssembly compiled language because it'll just be so simple. Yeah, I know. I think that it's cool that all of this exists because it gives us these, like a way to do straightforward JavaScript in a way that handles, you know, most of your use cases. But then when you need a lot of power or a different way of organizing and thinking about things, you know, you can write in a Rust compiled language, sorry, a Wasm compiled language and really have more of like an application level workflow in the browser. I'm thinking of things like Figma, which is, I think, compiled from Wasm and really feels like a desktop application that's running in your browser. And it's just really cool that you have all of these options available to us. And it really grows the platform as a whole as just being this place where you can write your simple forms, you can write your simple blog posts, you can write full on video games, and you can write your design tools all in it, which is just really cool to have one platform that can handle it all. Well, like, what are they, what was the joke in SpinalTap? RM goes to 11. You know, we have that little bit extra right there. Yeah, it will be fascinating to watch because, you know, I think, you know, there, if you kind of look at the trends here is, I think, you know, JavaScript obviously is a popular language, but was it popular because of it was just a very easy language to learn and use? Or was it because the browser was basically everywhere and kind of became like a new virtual machine that you use. And so like, you know, you look at TypeScript, I'm like, you know, maybe, maybe people really want types. And then, you know, that's, that's what's going on here. But, you know, I think maybe over time, JavaScript, you know, as a language maybe is less widely used, but the browser runtime that takes advantage of, you know, WASM essentially running, you know, inside of like V8 or any of the different WebAssembly runtimes will have that equivalent deployment model where the, wherever the browser runs, WebAssembly is going to run and basically use any programming language. It really is a happy little accident that we're here talking about JavaScript right now rather than, you know, talking about how cool our Java applets are. That's a happy accident for sure. Another thing that came out in 2020 or that reached 1.0 in 2020 was Dino, which is kind of a competitor to the node runtime in a lot of ways, where it takes a different look at the security model of node and how packages are created and consumed by within the project. It doesn't use common JS at all because it was created in a post-common JS world with where ECMAScript modules are part of the language. And do you see that being a competitor to the node ecosystem? It doesn't get a lot of attention yet, does it? I mean, Liz? Yeah, it doesn't get a lot of attention. Like, it definitely, like, I mean, it was created by the same creator of node and it's like, it's funny, no, Dino, like the same words, the same letters. But no, I thought it was going to have actually a bigger adoption, but I haven't seen that. I haven't seen, like, a very widely adoption of Dino, I don't know how to pronounce it, but I don't know what Chris has seen so far. Nothing in my part of the world, at least. Yeah. It's not something that I've played with too much either, but it is something that I'm keeping an eye on because I do like the idea of being able to write closer to actual JavaScript rather than, you know, requiring a bundler and all of these things. And all of that is also being solved in node, I think, with, you know, ES modules are now available in node. And so you can write that as well, and browsers understand them. So we are getting away from this kind of, we have to compile it to get the code to run anywhere back to, we can just write it and run it. And I'll still probably be writing it in TypeScript and have that compiler, but it is cool that we're all moving forward towards these standard-based solutions, which is pretty cool. And I think that Dino and ES modules in node really push that forward. Definitely. I think the idea behind Dino is very good. Like, he has a very good approach. And it seems that it was very well-built. But I think one of the main problems is that node, it's so popular. Like, it's, that is so hard to get over node. Like, like, if I have a huge project using node, what would I change to Dino? Even nodes already work, right? I think the main problem with Dino is like, no, it's already very popular. But Dino, like the, the infrastructure and the way Dino was built, I think it's super good. It's just, yeah, node is more popular. And I think it will always be. Yeah. Well, all right, let's go ahead and wrap up now. And so I'll just throw it to each of you real quick to give your final thoughts maybe on what you're excited about or what you anticipate seeing as we go into 2021. So Liz, do you want to go first? Yeah, sure. So definitely after 2019, I think I cannot predict anything. I mean, 2020 was such a difficult year that trying to predict things like everything can change tomorrow. Like, who knows, right? But I'm very excited for the post pandemic world to see. I'm very excited for inclusion and diversity. I'm very proud of that. And I also think types could might be still growing up a little bit, react. But yeah, like, now I'm scared of making predictions because who knows what's going to happen, right? Oh yeah. Alex, do you want to go next? The singularity is coming. We know it's coming. It's going to just, it's inevitable for that one language. I mean, with Microsoft running kind of the world. I'm being facetious a little bit here, but I think there's just a definite interesting play here that Microsoft has taken while being very friendly in the open source community. There's a lot of history with Microsoft and how they actually do like to operate. So I'm just very curious and a little bit skeptical. And I think that'll give rise to, you know, these competing capabilities. And one of the kind of interesting dynamics that I'm going to be looking at is how we think about web architectures and the standardization of web architectures over time. You know, again, quoting Richard, he wrote a story about web components and the Polymer project, which is interesting and kind of has a different take on the role of web components compared to, you know, what you see from the frameworks point of view. So, you know, I'm looking for some, you know, some change, but not dramatic change, but I'll be, you know, from my point of view, it's the web architectures that will continue to shape the landscape and how we do things. Yeah, definitely. Chris, you want to go next? Sure. I'll be quick. Two things. I think one, we kind of alluded to this, I think, you know, web assembly is continuing to kind of grow as an option, especially as it matures, not only in the browser, but outside the browser and other kind of WASM runtimes environment, you know, the WASI spec is evolving. So things are being supported to kind of meet those needs for folks that are running out of browsers. So to me, that was a simple one. I think that's an easy, easy prediction. I think the other thing that, you know, given someone who's probably built, you know, developer tools for, you know, over half of his career, I think this kind of modern, you know, let's call it like shared developer workspaces. So I don't know if you played with GitHub code spaces or Git pod, as example. I think that's going to kind of take over as a more common development style for folks where, you know, if you're already on GitHub and you go open up and get, you know, get up code spaces or Git pod and one click and have everything set up configured, people are going to use it, right, especially new contributors. Imagine going to a repo and not having to like, you know, figure out like, all right, how does this thing build? How do I set up if you actually had a development environment that will be built, prebuilt and load up VS code in the browser on the fly and allow you to contribute with very little setup, I think it's going to change things. So whatever we're going to call it cloud native development environments, I don't know, but that's going to be, I think, a huge thing, especially as GitHub code spaces comes out of beta this year. I think it's going to change the industry. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, all of our tooling is going to the cloud and being written in JavaScript and running in a browser. It's really quite cool to see and I'll just close off by saying that, you know, we've seen so many cool changes with JavaScript, it can persevere through anything, even a pandemic. And I'm really looking forward to what we do in 2021 and beyond. So I just want to thank all of you for joining me, you know, Alex, Liz, Chris, thank you so much for being here and sharing your thoughts. And we will see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. So thanks for hosting. Good to see you.