A Brief History of Javascript

So what is javascript? JavaScript is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm, single-threaded, dynamic language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and declarative (e.g. functional programming) styles. That's a mouthful and it doesn't really matter if you understand it at this point. Just know that javascript is a high-level language that provides computing logic for the internet. If you imagine your website like a house. html is the walls and boards that make the frame, css is the paint and countertops and javascript would be the wiring and plumbing that makes the house usable. So now we know what javascript is, let's look at how it got here.

Who's Idea was this Anyways

In 1995 a web browser called netscape navigator was set to add a scripting language to their browser. The original plan to implement this was to embed Java or scheme. Though shortly after netscape decided that a new language based on Java should be created. This task was given to Brendan Eich who was originally hired to embed Scheme. In just 10 days Eich turned around and handed over a scripting language which at the time was called livescript. The name was later changed to javascript.

Early Adoption

The programming language Java was the buzz word of the day so many people think that the name Javascript was a marketing ploy. Those working with Java viewed this new scripting language as UI glue to be used by designers and non-technicals. Turns out UI glue was just what the web was missing and the language began to take hold. Javascript began to grow rapidly and by 1997 netscape handed over Javascript to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) for them to create a specification.
Microsoft reverse engineered the netscape Javascript interpreter for IE 5 creating a scripting language called Jscript. Which was a defacto standard for the late 90s early 2000s in term of client side scripting languages used on the web.

Things began to change in 2004 when Mozilla release the firefox browser. This took some market shares away from IE and Jscript. In 2005 Jesse James Garrett wrote a paper titled "introduced Ajax". This paper was about a suite of technologies for the web that featured Javascript as the backbone. This really helped to push the popularity of JavaScript and helped it be seen as a serious programming language.

Conglomeration and Maturity

In 2008 GOOGLE released Chrome, which featured the v8 engine The big innovation with v8 was JIT (just-in-time) compilation that made it faster than the competition.
This was the point where large tech giants began working together. In 2009 after a conference they decided to combine all their relevant work and this eventually lead to the release of ECMAscript 5.
There was a lot of work happening to the language at this time with many new proposals and ideas being thrown around. A key innovation at the time was not from a standard body but from a single individual. Ryan Dahl created node.js, a javascript runtime environment that let developers run javascript outside of a web browser using the v8 engine. By the time 2015 rolled around a new standard ECMAscript 6 the most current version of javascript was released. By this time javascript is a serious coding language essential for anyone working in web development, front or back end.

About 98% of the web uses javascript in some way and 78% of developers use javascript. Thanks to runtime environments like node or deno, javascript can be run anywhere, to do just about anything. So I think it's safe to say it's not going anywhere and now you know a bit about how it got here. I hope you enjoyed these articles on the history of web technologies. It's been very eye opening as a new dev to learn the history of things I use all the time. Cheers and Have fun coding javascript out there.