JavaScript We asked in the survey about feature areas that cause issues , and “JavaScript (core language)” was the 2nd most chosen option, chosen by 26% of survey respondents. The “core language” parenthetical was added to direct survey takers to other options where appropriate, especially DOM APIs. Unfortunately, the boundaries between JavaScript and the rest of the web platform are not easy to understand. For example, encodeURIComponent is defined in the ECMAScript Language Specification while the URL interface is defined in the URL Standard. Understanding if web developers do face a compatibility problem with JavaScript itself became a main study goal for the interviews. We typically asked "can you talk about a recent time you had a browser compatibility problem with JavaScript" and listened to what the interview participants had to say. The pattern that emerged from our interviews, and which is consistent with the free-form survey responses that mentioned JavaScript, is that most web developers don’t face big issues with browser compatibility for JavaScript as a language. Use of transpilers like Babel appears widespread, and even those who wanted to avoid transpilers did not say it was very difficult to deal with browser compatibility. When asking about issues with JavaScript, the concrete things raised were mostly not part of ECMAScript, but the wider web platform. However, no specific issue came up twice. There is likely a long tail of issues affecting all parts of the platform, which can manifest in JavaScript code, and which together could explain why JavaScript showed up the way it did in the survey results. It is worth noting that in both survey responses and in some interviews, we heard from web developers who would perhaps rather not use transpilers, either due to the added complexity or the increased code size. Finally, a small caveat. The web developers who volunteered for our interviews were very experienced. It is plausible that more novice web developers would not work around JavaScript compatibility issues using transpilers or polyfills as readily.
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