I heard that when I began learning JavaScript: “JavaScript has nothing to do with Java.” It’s still the first sentence on Wikipedia under the headline of JavaScript.
I don’t know why, but it came to my mind again on this weekend: If it’s not related to Java, then why is it called JavaScript? What is the meaning of ECMAScript if this is JavaScript? Who’s ECMA? What does Script mean? Then I found myself writing this post when I was deep-diving into all these issues.
JavaScript has been created by Brendan Eich in 1995. It was the early days of WWW. The web pages were nothing more than static text pages. Of course, after a while, people are looking for more dynamic interactions with websites. Netscape’s team started working towards this. At least, Javascript was created which is a scripting language for Netscape browsers.
They used to call it Mocha when it was still being developed. Then obtained ‘LiveScript’ as a name within the test process. At least, in 1997, changed the name LiveScript as JavaScript with the beta of Netscape Navigator 2.0.
While Javascript has no direct relativity to Java, it is made confusing for people. Although there was no relation as technologically, it has an indirect connection.
In the ’90s, Netscape had a major rival in the browser war. This was Microsoft. In 1995, Micros developed Internet Explorer and made it part of its operating systems. Then Netscape started working on an operational system. They invest and support to Java language. They also plan to use Javascript as their scripting language for this operating system. As a result, they selected Java as the name for marketing.
While adding JavaScipt inside the browser, Netscape has opened developing new kind of website. Then Microsoft announced a new scripting language that was added to Explorer. They called JScript.
In 1996, Netscape applied to ECMA for defining JavaScript as industrial standards. In 1997, ECMA published ECMAScript Language Specification for scripting language standardization.
So What and Who is ECMA?
Now let’s go to ECMA. ECMA (European computer manufacturers Association) is a non-profit organization that aims to develop standards for computer hardware, software languages, and communication technologies.
The QWERTY layout for keyboards is one of the standards defined by ECMA. Also, ECMA has set standards for a lot of software and hardware technologies, from floppy disks to C languages, and then they prepare international standards.
They have named ECMA-262 as standard for Javascript. In 1997, ECMA began work to develop the standard. They got JScript and Javascript as a reference point for the new script language standard and they call it ECMAScript. As noted in ECMAScript standards;
ECMAScript is based on several originating technologies, the most well-known being JavaScript (Netscape) and JScript (Microsoft).
The last version was published in June 2021 as the 12th version. The other term is TC39 (Technical Committee 39) that you can see so many times in the document. This term defines the group responsible for the development of ECMA-262.
What is ECMAScript?
ECMAScript is a term that uses defines the standardization of the scripting language. These standards define what a scripting language requires with functions and rules.
We may say that JavaScript is a scripting language that follows the rules and functions that define in ECMAScript.
If we say that JS is the language we use, then ECMAScript is the standard of such languages. You can learn how to create a scripting language by looking at ECMAScript’s standards and learn how to use JavaScript by reading the JavaScript documentation.
What is Scripting — Script Language?
We have called script or script language up to now, but what is script language?
Software languages can be separated into three groups:
- Programming languages,
- Scripting languages
- Markup languages.
Programming languages are essentially defined software languages that we can tell computers what to do. These languages make it possible to manage the hardware by compiling in machine language.
Moreover, scripting languages are different from the programming language, and in fact, we can position them as a subgroup of programming languages.
The script, in the dictionary, refers to the series of instructions, writing using a particular alphabet or a set of works to be made as a scenario. Like a meaning word, script languages are an automated series of statements executed in a particular order.
Scripting languages are programs that work at the runtime, read and interpret by programs without compilation. These are domain-specific languages. So they just work for a certain job.
JavaScipt is a good example of scripting languages:
- Runs only inside browsers.
- Can’t be compiled.
- It is interpreted directly in runtime.
- It may modify HTML documents.
- Not direct access to the hardware.
JavaScript became the first language in the list of popular software languages for several years. JavaScript gets new updates through 2016 quickly and more than in the past. As written in the documentation, JavaScript is still live and it has not yet completed its evolution, and it will continue to grow with new features.
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