Honestly, you can get by just fine in this industry without really understanding JavaScript. You don't have to. Oh — no, yeah, you're in the right place. This is the JavaScript for Everyone newsletter; the No JavaScript for Anyone newsletter is the next browser tab over. I'm a subscriber too!
It's just, if you're new here, the subject line might have led you to believe that I'd say you have to learn JavaScript to be, like, "taken seriously as an industry professional." That's not how we do things here. Here at JavaScript for Everyone Incorporated we don't brook gatekeeping, we don't hold truck with anyone who would, and it makes us no nevermind that we make casual use of so many old-timey phrases. Point is, I know a huge number of brilliant and successful web developers who only interact with JavaScript grudgingly, if ever at all.
Granted, I'm not going to tell you that you wouldn't benefit from learning JavaScript. To understand JavaScript is to understand the boundaries of how users interact with the web, and that's no small thing. I know I've said this a lot throughout newsletters, the course itself, and to anyone who accidentally makes eye contact with me on a subway platform, but: broadening our understanding of the medium we work with every day sharpens all of our skills, from layout to accessibility to front-end performance to typography. Understanding JavaScript means less "I wonder if it's possible to..." or "I guess we have to..." in your day-to-day decision making, even if you're not the one tasked with writing JavaScript. Expanding our skillsets will always make us better — and more valued, professionally — as web developers.
That brings us to that part that grates on me: too many of the talented web developers I mentioned earlier avoid digging too deep into JavaScript because they think they can't learn JavaScript.
I get the impulse; I do. JavaScript can be difficult to learn, in no uncertain terms — from the outside, JavaScript is intimidating. But here at JavaScript for Everyone LLC DBA JavaScript for Everyone Esq., we don't let gates do any gatekeeping either. I've been beating this drum for ages now, and I hit it harder with each passing day: you can do this.
JavaScript was built by people — a collaborative effort by countless developers, spanning decades. Once you learn to see the fingerprints they left behind — start to see the rules and syntaxes for the good, bad, and deeply weird decisions that went into them — you'll start to see how JavaScript is complicated, sure, but knowable. The rules that govern how it operates are a little arcane, but once you've seen how the gears mesh, it can't intimidate you any more.
If you work on the web, you're a web developer — hell, HTML and CSS, in concert with user interaction, are Turing complete. That's programming by any practical measure. You — you, specifically — can do more than just "get by" with JavaScript. You can understand it, all the way down to the mechanisms that power the language — the mechanisms that power the entire interactive layer of the web. You'll be a stronger web developer for it.