JavaScript is simple, or at least it used to be. If you’ve done any programming, and you know how to use Google then you can program in JavaScript. Of course, to make it more powerful we have to complicate things.

We make extensions to JavaScript, like ES6, that then need to be ‘transpiled’ to turn them back into regular JavaScript that the browser can understand.

And we build libraries like React and Vue that make it ‘simpler’ to build complex applications. But they’re complicated to learn. They make working with JavaScript very different, you need to think about things in a different way.

For designers like myself this is a lot of new concepts to learn, the vast array of options can be overwhelming so you can do what I do and ignore it. I work for myself, on my own projects, so I don’t really need to learn it.

But then WordPress is moving heavily towards React, so maybe I should?

I keep saying I will learn React but I haven’t had a need so I haven’t done anything about it. With Gutenberg getting ever nearer I feel I should actually start learning, and so I’ve been collecting tutorials for learning React. Obviously I haven’t been following them, but I will do one day!