The History of JavaScript
One of the first things I learned when I first became interested in the field of software engineering, was that JavaScript is pretty important. More than half of the job postings I saw had it as a requirement and it was part of the curriculum of every bootcamp I looked into. In fact, the first joke amongst programmers that I was made privy to, was that “JavaScript is everywhere.”
For nearly a decade JavaScript has been ranked the most commonly used programming language. It is considered by many to be the most important programming language of our time. 95% of all websites (which is approximately 1.5 billion websites) are built using JavaScript, and its many frameworks and libraries have allowed it to branch out into many other parts of software development.
In summary, JavaScript is everywhere.
However, It didn’t take long for me to notice that there seems to be a mythos surrounding the creation of JavaScript that isn’t present for any other language.
And I can see why. As a new developer, fresh to the world of JavaScript the most interesting thing to me is not its functionality nor its ubiquity, but its history.
Creation of Javascript
The history of JavaScript is an odd one. Most people are familiar with its basic origin story. JavaScript was created in just 10 days by Brendan Eich for Netscape. This, while true, doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of JavaScript’s peculiar origin and its rise to fame.
It all starts in the 90s. The 90s were a pivotal time for the internet and it saw the rise of many new programming languages, browsers and technologies. The internet, as we know it today, began in the 90s.
In 1993, developer Marc Andreessen helped the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois to launch Mosaic: a user-friendly, graphical web browser. Then in 1994, Andreessen founded the private Mosaic Communications Corporation and published a commercial browser called Netscape Navigator.
Netscape Navigator was a hit!
On August 9th, 1995, only 8 months later, Netscape went public. Shares were offered at $28 apiece before Netscape’s Initial Public Offer. At the opening bell, the price shot up, and by the end of August 9, Netscape closed at $58.25 after reaching as high as $74.75 during the day. Netscape’s IPO had set new records.
Netscape was only a 16-month-old company and had yet to make a single dime in profits but it was now valued at nearly 3 billion dollars.
But trouble was on the horizon.
At this point, the internet was evolving into a multimedia universe and was becoming more and more popular in the mainstream. This brought on an onslaught of competition, mainly Microsoft. Soon Microsoft began to chip away at Netscape’s browser share with their own browser, Internet Explorer.
This led to what is now known as the first browser war.
Internet Explorer was still in development but Andreessen knew that Navigator would have to push new features to maintain dominance over Microsoft. He had the vision that the web needed a way to become more dynamic. That animations, automation and interaction should be part of the web.
In 1995 Netscape brokered a deal with another Microsoft competitor, Sun Microsystems, which was debuting a major programming language, Java.
While Java did borrow syntax from other languages, the compiled Java bytecode is portable, meaning it can run on different operating systems. This meant that a user with both Navigator and the Java Virtual Machine installed could execute Java programs as standalone “applets,” contained within the web page but still separated from it.
This delineation meant that there was still a need for a language to “glue” Java together with the major interactive parts of the client-side web.
The belief at the time was that Java was not suited for scripters, amateurs, designers etc. Java was “too big” for the role. The idea was to make Java available for big, professional, writers; while this other language would be used for small scripting tasks.
And so the idea of Mocha was born. Mocha was to become a scripting language for the web. Simple, dynamic, and accessible to non-developers. Mocha was meant to be the scripting companion for Java.
It was around this time that Brendan Eich came into the picture.
Eich was hired to develop a “scheme for the browser.”
Scheme is a Lisp dialect that comes with little syntactic weight. It is dynamic, powerful, and functional in nature.
Netscape also gave Eich the specification that whatever he came up with had to “look like Java.” And on top of all this he had a very tight deadline to deliver this new language.
At the moment there was a lot of pressure to come up with a working prototype as soon as possible. Java was starting to get traction. Sun Microsystems was making a push for it and Netscape Communications was about to close a deal with them to make Java available in the browser. So Eich had to work fast.
In a matter of weeks a working prototype was functional, and so it was integrated into Netscape Communicator.
This new language combined the superficialities and control structures from Java and core functional and object-oriented behavior from Scheme and Self.
The prototype of Mocha was integrated into Netscape Communicator in May 1995. In a short time, it was renamed to LiveScript. By December of 1995, Netscape Communications and Sun closed the deal and Mocha/LiveScript was renamed, JavaScript. It was presented as a scripting language for small client-side tasks in the browser, while Java would be promoted as a bigger, professional tool to develop rich web components.
At first JavaScript didn’t perform as well. Java developers viewed it as a lesser entity, for non-engineers. To them, JavaScript was more of a “UI glue” to be used mostly by designers and other non-engineers. This glue however, allowed the internet to flourish. Programmers could react better to use events and compose interactive components. And because of that, JavaScript’s popularity grew.
ECMAScript
JavaScript’s rapid growth made it clear that the language would need to be properly maintained and managed. Netscape knew that for an interactive, dynamic web to succeed, JavaScript would have to be consistent across browsers. Netscape gave the job of creating a language specification to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), a body founded with the goal of standardizing computing.
Work on the standard for JavaScript was started in November 1996. In 1997, the organization laid out the platform-agnostic specifications for “ECMAScript” (ES), the language commonly known as JavaScript. ECMAScript went through a bevy of revisions. ES2 in 1998 and ES3 in 1999 brought a number of important features and continued to progress JavaScript from “scripting glue” into a full-fledged programming language.
Unfortunately, the following years were not good for JavaScript’s development. ECMAScript 4 took almost 8 years of development but was abandoned due to differing opinions on the direction of the language and its proposed features.
ECMAScript did not see another major update until 2015, with ECMAScript6.
This time the committee had achieved unity. Still, ECMAScript6 was hard work and took almost 6 years to complete.
JQuery
In 2006 John Regis introduced jQuery to strip common and repetitive tasks out of JavaScript. It is a JavaScript library that makes use of the DOM (document object model) structure and makes it easier to manipulate DOM elements. With an easy-to-learn syntax, JQuery led to more interactivity being added to webpages.
Frameworks
JavaScript was originally meant to be a client side language but different frameworks and techniques have helped fill in the gaps. Thanks to these JavaScript can be used as both a client side and server side language as well as for mobile development. Two of its most popular Frameworks are Angular and React.
Angular
Angular was developed by Adam Abrons and Misko Hevery and released in 2010. It is an open-source framework targeted at single page applications. Angular was the first framework that provided a complete architecture for front-end application development. It is mainly maintained by Google.
React
React was developed by Facebook in 2011. It is an open-source framework and has over 1300 contributors on Github. React is known for being very flexible and can be used as both a client and server side framework. It is ranked as the most popular front-end JavaScript Framework.
Overall, the history of JavaScript has been long and rocky. From its notorious 10 day creation, to the 8 year, failed battle for its 4th update. Still, it’s clear that JavaScript is indispensable to the world of web development and because it continues to grow and evolve, it’s likely to continue to be indispensable for the foreseeable future. I can only surmise that the future of JavaScript will be just as interesting as its past.