How Does Javascript Work?

The modern web is built with javascript, the open-source scripting language that powers many interactive features you find on your favorite websites. It’s a powerful tool that helps developers add functionality to web pages like animation, pop-up windows, search bars, chat widgets, and more. It also allows for real-time updates to be displayed on a page without it having to refresh the entire browser window. This is a very important feature for sites that display stock or crypto prices, live event coverage, or real-time product availability.

As a programmer, you’re likely already using javascript on a daily basis for your work, whether it be for frontend development in a browser or backend development on a server. But how much do you really understand about how it all works under the hood? In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the core features of javascript and give you some insight into how it all works.

Variables are at the heart of every programming language, and javascript is no exception. Variables allow you to store and retrieve values at any point in your code. Without them, it would be impossible to do dynamic things like personalizing a greeting or changing the text of a button. Javascript variables can be anything, but they’re usually named with a string, and they’re case sensitive (myVariable is not the same as myvariable).

Functions are the building blocks of javascript, and are one of its most distinguishing features. They’re used to do work for you, and they often take arguments that help them do their job. If you see something that looks like a variable name followed by parentheses–()—it’s probably a function. Functions return a value, and this value is what’s executed when the function is run. Functions are a great way to break your code up into smaller units that you can easily read and maintain.

The main types of values in javascript are strings, numbers, and arrays. In addition to the standard numeric operators (+, -, *, /, and %, which operate on integers, floats, and percentages respectively), you can use , , and for string manipulation. Strings are sequences of Unicode characters, and are represented by either single or double quotes. Numbers are ints, and have a default value of 0. Arrays in javascript are hashes that can be queried at any time. Object keys can be any string or symbol — even array indices, which are canonically integers, are actually strings.

With a growing number of people adopting virtual reality on a regular basis, javascript has also become an essential part of the platform. It’s being used in the backend of these platforms to create the immersive experiences users can enjoy, as well as on the front end to provide a more interactive experience for the user.