Top JavaScript Frameworks and Topics to Learn in

2020 and the New Decade

Eric Elliott
Jan 3 · 14 min read

If you want to land a great JavaScript job or catch up on important tech for 2020 and
important technologies in the new decade, this post is for you. The point of this post is
not to tell you which tech stacks and frameworks are the “best” or most loved or most
popular — but to shed some light on which ones give you the best odds of landing a
great job in 2020 and beyond.

We’re going to look at data from a variety of sources:

Google Search trends by topic

State of JS Survey

Stack Overflow Survey

Npm downloads

Aggregated job postings

None of these metrics are perfect, but for our purposes, the npm download counts and
job postings get the most weight, and when we look at the metrics in aggregate, they
paint a clear and consistent picture of the JavaScript technology landscape and trends.
Is it a good idea to select a framework to learn based on these metrics? That depends on
your goal.

Since we have a clear goal — learning ROI for job seekers — that makes the task much
easier than trying to tell you what’s best for everyone. While there is no such thing as
best for all purposes, it’s pretty easy to objectively define what will give you the best
odds of achieving a specific, concrete goal. Let’s look at some data.

First, Learn JavaScript

Before you worry too much about tech stacks, learn JavaScript and how to compose
software with it. If you can’t explain what function composition, object composition,
and modules are, start here. All software development is composition: We take a large,
complex problem and break it down into smaller problems that we can solve with the
building blocks of software: Functions, objects, modules, and so on. We assemble those
solutions to form our applications. Start 2020 with a good understanding of JavaScript
and software composition.

React Dominated 2019, and Will Probably Dominate 2020

I like the npm downloads metric because it gives a pretty good indication of a
framework’s active usage*. Frameworks used commonly in industry will score
uncommonly high on downloads because users are running npm install on their local
machines.
Note: jQuery is excluded here because many jQuery projects are legacy projects which do
not use npm, so it would be severely undercounted, anyway. Svelte is included to provide
some insight on its relative position in the market, and explain its absence in the rest of the
charts — there is not yet enough data for Svelte to make a meaningful showing in the
charts. For example, it is not yet an available topic in the Google Search Trends.

Aggregated Job Postings

This chart counts currently open job postings mentioning a particular framework.*

Dec 2019 Job Board Listings by UI Framework — Source

React strengthened its lead vs last year, while both Angular and jQuery lost ground to
Vue. Here’s a pie chart showing the relative job market share for each framework:
 Top Framework Job Market Share

Average JavaScript developer salary increased again in 2019, from $111k/year to

$114k/year (source).

*Methodology: Job searches were conducted on Indeed.com. To weed out false positives, I
paired searches with the keyword “software” to strengthen the chance of relevance, and
then multiplied by ~1.5 (roughly the difference between programming job listings that use
the word “software” and those that don’t.) All SERPS were sorted by date and spot checked
for relevance. The resulting figures aren’t 100% accurate, but they’re good enough for the
relative approximations used in this article.

Google Search Trends

Source

As you may expect, search interest* is somewhat reflective of the job market share,
with some interesting differences. We can clearly see a waning interest in jQuery
between 2017 and today, along with strong growth in Vue.js search interest. Here are
the search shares:
As with the job postings, React has a strong lead, attracting 36% of the search volume
for front end frameworks, followed by Angular at about 27% and jQuery at 25%.
Search interest in Vue.js is larger than its job market share by a healthy margin, but this
data generally agrees with the job market data in rankings. It looks like we have
successful corroboration.

*Methodology: For all terms, data is collected by topic, rather than search term in order to
weed out false positives from irrelevant keyword matches.

Frameworks to Watch in the Future

More jobs are looking for skills with React than for skills with any of the other
popular, but less widely used frameworks such as Svelte or Vue (which both have very
high satisfaction ratings, but comparably far smaller industry adoption).

It may be cool to learn Svelte or Vue — but if your

goal is to get a job, you’ll have better odds if you
learn React first.
That said, both Svelte and Vue scored very high on user satisfaction in the State of
JavaScript 2019 survey. In the past, React’s high user satisfaction scores predicted
rapid gains vs Angular, which was dominating at the time, but had comparatively low
satisfaction scores.

In 2019, React ranked highest in user satisfaction with 89% users satisfied. Runners up
include Svelte (88%) and Vue.js (87% — down from 91% last year). It’s unlikely that
Svelte or Vue will steal enough React users to make a dent, but there are still lots of
users using Angular and jQuery who could defect to Svelte or Vue, driving further
strong growth for both frameworks in 2020.
 It’s a strong bet that having a mastery of React will
increase your odds of finding and retaining a great
job in 2020.
TypeScript vs JavaScript
There is no question TypeScript has grown very rapidly over the course of the last few
years, and according to the State of JavaScript survey, 89% of TypeScript users would
use it again, and 66% of survey respondents either use TypeScript, or are interested in
using TypeScript (down slightly from 71% least year).

But while interest is certainly strong and usage seems to be growing quickly,
experience with TypeScript is not yet in strong demand on the job market. Only ~7%
of JavaScript job openings mention TypeScript in the job description (source). This is
probably undercounting TypeScript jobs a little because hiring managers expect
JavaScript developers to be capable of picking up TypeScript without much trouble, so
there’s a chance they won’t bother to mention TypeScript in their job postings.

I stand by my assessment that the TypeScript language may have a low or even
negative return on investment. It could hurt rather than improve your productivity, and
if you’re already using great bug prevention measures such as TDD, code review, and
design review, coding in TypeScript is unlikely to provide a significant bug reduction
benefit.

That said, there is a lot to love about TypeScript, and you certainly should not be afraid
of it, or turn down a job because they use TypeScript instead of JavaScript. Because
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, onboarding from JavaScript to TypeScript is not
as challenging as learning an entirely different language.

You probably don’t need to learn the TypeScript language to get an edge on the job
market competition in 2020, but the TypeScript engine is quite useful, even for
standard JavaScript.

I use it every day to provide intellisense for standard JavaScript using Visual Studio
Code. That intellisense can even be enhanced using JSDoc (which the TypeScript
engine understands and interprets as it would interpret type annotations) or external
d.ts files, and VS Code will automatically acquire TypeScript definitions for the
modules you use.

Note: I’ve been enjoying similar benefits for several years using TernJS and Atom, but that
combination lacks the maintenance and community support of TypeScript engine + VS
Code.

If you haven’t tried Visual Studio Code yet, you may want to start there. BTW, VS Code
dominates the JavaScript IDE market among State of JS respondents, with 57% market
share (followed by WebStorm, with 14% market share).

Data Management
Redux still has a strong lead in the state manager race, but GraphQL and Apollo are
gaining in satisfaction and interest. Expect to see continued growth of GraphQL in
2020.
That said, I still think there’s a strong case for Redux state management even if you use
GraphQL, and I think everyone would benefit from learning Redux even if they don’t
use the framework.

GraphQL is a query language that has become popular in recent years. It has simple
syntax, but because it’s used across the full stack and learning it entails learning how to
hook it up to your data storage layer, it can be intimidating to integrate — but well
worth the effort.

GraphQL is not going to completely replace JSON REST APIs any time soon, but it grew
even faster in 2019, and I expect strong growth to continue into 2020.

Back End
Express is the dominant Node framework, with very high satisfaction and no serious
challengers going into 2020, but with the rise of serverless, I expect to see Express
dominance slip as the new decade unfolds.

Next.js is a full stack React framework which was initially built on top of Express, but
has since switched from Express to serverless and static optimization and it’s growing
like crazy.

When we switched EricElliottJS.com from Express to serverless Next.js, it cut our

hosting bill 90% and sped up page loads. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. We’re
now using Next.js and Zeit hosting for all our apps.
Testing
Jest and Cypress are most popular for unit and functional testing, respectively, but I
have a strong preference for RITEWay and TestCafe. RITEWay is unit testing zen: A
testing framework which always answers the 5 questions every unit test must answer.

TestCafe is a functional testing tool which, like Cypress, does not require you to
struggle with Selenium, but has better cross browser support and a cool test
recorder/IDE. I strongly recommend QA teams check out TestCafe.

Functional Tools
Lodash, Ramda, Immer, Redux, and RxJS are the functional tools I frequently use.

Ramda grew a lot in 2019, and offers some tools that are not features of Lodash,
including lenses and transducers. RxJS offers transducer style functionality with its
pipeable operators.
Immer makes it easy to operate on JavaScript objects without mutating them. Redux is
a state management tool.

The Tech Landscape in 2020

There are several emerging technologies which are set to make a dramatic impact on
human life over the course of the next decade. Here’s a rundown of the current state of
the art in each:

AI
AI may be the most transformational technology ever developed. Various scholars and
opinionated billionaires have described AI as a miraculous utopia, or the end of
humanity.

It certainly could be the end of humanity as we know it, but it could be the beginning
of a beautiful collaboration between humans and machines. We’re only beginning to
catch shadowy glimpses of what AI could become. Some of it scary (like deep fakes)
and some of it extremely useful (like Adobe Premiere’s new auto-reframe for video
editing). The truth so far is that AI is both incredibly scary and incredibly useful. Some
scary things will continue to come out of AI, but the potential to improve human life
with AI is tremendous. Pandora’s box is already open, and there’s no closing it again, so
it is my hope that you’ll use it well to solve important problems and improve lives.

There were many important breakthroughs in the field of AI in 2019. In recent years,
research teams have been competing for superhuman performance in a variety of video
games, but some classes of games remain challenging for AI, including long term
strategy games such as StarCraft II. DeepMind’s AlphaStar program has achieved
grandmaster level playing on the official Battle.net servers using the same resources
human players have access to. StarCraft is a complex game involving long-term
strategic thinking once thought to be beyond the capabilities of AI. Strategic thinking
represents a major milestone on the path to general AI.

If these games seem like a silly use of resources, consider that projects like DeepMind
have also made incredible advancements in text-to-speech, which can give AI agents
and personal assistants more natural voices, but also importantly, give voices back to
humans who have lost them.
AI is also being used to diagnose cancer, predict protein folding (which could be used
to learn about disease and discover new medicines), restore limb control for the
disabled, generate photo realistic images, etc. (Source)

Self driving cars deserve their own category in transformational AI technology. Big
players in that ecosystem include Cruise, Uber, Waymo, Nuro, Aurora, Ford, etc. It’s
still early days, and over-optimism has caused real problems for the industry, but I have
no doubt we’ll see superhuman self-driving capabilities inside the 2020s. I made a
prediction about self driving in 2015:

“By 2045, a human driving a car will look like a

horse pulling a buggy.”
5 years later, I think I may have underestimated how fast self-driving cars would hit the
market. Waymo vehicles drove over 1 million miles in 2018, and 24 US cities had self
driving cars on public roads. Today, I’m predicting full level 5 autonomy in multiple car
models from multiple manufacturers by 2025. Keep your eyes on Tesla, GM, Ford, and
BMW.

AI research paper publication has grown 10x over the past decade, and now that AI is
putting practical, useful tools into the hands of mainstream users, expect that trend to
continue into the new decade.
We’re already starting to see AI do things that most people would not have believed
possible just a few years ago. Expect AI to work even more stunning miracles in the
2020s.

Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies

2019 was a monumental year in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain technology is beginning to break into the mainstream. I’m expecting even
more growth and mainstream adoption in 2020.

DeFi exploded, enabling user friendly, permissionless, and bankless borrowing and
lending. There is currently $650 million locked in DeFi contracts (including $450
million in bankless loans), and 2019 was the first year that this technology was
available. As more people invest in cryptocurrency, I predict a lot more crypto-backed
DeFi loans in the future.

People can access liquidity without sacrificing the opportunity cost of their crypto
investments, or use DeFi loans to invest in crypto with leverage (increasing the
risk/reward of their investment).

Crypto and blockchain technology is breaking through to the mainstream. Daily active
addresses for Bitcoin and Ethereum peaked in January 2018, followed by a year of
waning interest due to the down market (after every 10x climb, crypto prices fall back
dramatically before climbing 10x higher than the previous peak in the next cycle).

Daily Active Addresses on the Bitcoin and Ethereum Blockchains (Source)

Square’s Cash App has over 10 million Android downloads — users can buy,
sell, send and receive Bitcoin in a simple app with great UX.

Coinbase has over 10 million Android downloads.

 Brave launched built-in Ethereum wallet and went from 8.7 million monthly
active users in October to 10.4 million MAU at the end of November.

20 million video game fans are using the Theta network for decentralized
streaming thanks to Sliver.tv and DLive.

My favorite development of 2019 was the introduction of Fortmatic. Whether you’re

building a crypto app or not, you can replace your user authentication with Fortmatic
and improve security, break free of vendor lock-in, and add capabilities such as end-to-
end encryption, signed transactions, etc.

If you’re building a new app in 2020, consider using Fortmatic instead of rolling your
own username/password auth (which nobody should be doing in 2020), or delegating
auth to Google, Facebook, etc.

I wrote an article discussing how to leverage crypto technology to improve app

authentication and security. I am looking forward to seeing mainstream apps adopt
technologies like Fortmatic in 2020.

Ethereum easily won the smart contract platform race in 2019. I predict it will
continue to dominate in 2020.

Extended Reality (XR)

I’ve been writing about the promise of AR every year since 2015, and dreaming about it
since I was a kid. In the future, XR will replace cell phones. It’s only a matter of time.
How much time is still an open question, but it looks like the shift could come in the
next decade. It could even start within the next 5 years.

As the lines have blurred betwen VR and AR, the industry is now referring to the whole
field as XR (eXtended Reality). ARKit and ARCore (Apple and Google’s Augmented
Reality SDKs) have grown a lot since their introduction. Monthly active users grew
from 47 million to 150 million between 2017 and May 2019.

WebAR gained a foothold in 2019, and it’s likely to continue to grow in 2020. If you’re
curious check out AR.js, React 360, or Viro React.

There have been many advancements in hardware. Hololens 1 was about $5k when the
developer edition was first released in 2016. What’s happened since then?
Hololens 2 is still $3,500, and they’re not ready for consumers, yet. There are still
issues with clipping, SLAM (jitter and drift), field of view, etc. And you don’t want to
wear these things all day. But thanks to the $99/month pricing, getting your hands on
a developer kit may be a possibility — even if you have to sit on the waiting list for a
while.

Drones
About 2 million drones have been sold in the United States, and they have already
transformed construction, geographic surveys, mapping, film, aerial photography,
farming, environmental science, and fun. There’s a good chance commercial drone
deliveries will finally be a thing in the United States in 2020.

FPV Drone Racing is my new favorite spectator sport, and the Drone Racing League
live streams races. They also have a carefully engineered simulator, if you want to get
an idea of what it’s like.
All this new drone activity requires a lot of software, including image processing, drone
mapping software, flight planning for deliveries, telemetry recording and processing,
analytics, industry application integrations, etc.

There’s also a lot of overlap with AI — self flying drones require image processing,
collision avoidance and so on.

Conclusion
The 2010s gave us a lot of transformative technologies, many of which we’re already
taking for granted, but had a big impact:

Instagram

Spotify

Uber

Virtual assistants

Wireless earbuds

Mainstream VR

Augmented reality (as used in the breakout hit game, “Pokémon GO”)

Affordable Teslas

The sharing economy (cars, scooters, bikes)

Mainstream tablets

Mainstream biometrics (touch ID, face ID)

Crowdfunding
I can’t wait to see what you build in the new decade.

Make some magic.

Next Steps
Learn React, Redux, Next.js, TDD and more on EricElliottJS.com. Access a treasure
trove of video lessons and interactive code exercises for members.

. . .

Eric Elliott is the author of the books, “Composing Software” and “Programming
JavaScript Applications”. As co-founder of EricElliottJS.com and DevAnywhere.io, he
teaches developers essential software development skills. He builds and advises
development teams for crypto projects, and has contributed to software experiences for
Adobe Systems, Zumba Fitness, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, BBC, and top
recording artists including Usher, Frank Ocean, Metallica, and many more.

He enjoys a remote lifestyle with the most beautiful woman in the world.

Thanks to JS_Cheerleader.

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