A History of JavaScript: What is it?

A History of JavaScript: What is it?

Now I know you might think that you know JavaScript but you don't. Or at least, not that well. It all started in a company called Netscape at a time where the web was ruled by monopolists like Internet Explorer. At that time the main browsers were Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. To break this routine and normal, Netscape came up with a groundbreaking technology. In 10 days! That's right, JavaScript was designed and curated in 10 days by Netscape (Brendon Eich, an employee) in 1995 as the client side scripting language for the web. It was never designed to be fast or efficient. It was made just to run. It was a method validating forms and providing interactivity in webpages. Microsoft and Netscape came out with support for this new language. But a lot of things happened in between and since this is the entire history of a decades old language, let's recap a little.

History of Netscape

Netscape was established in the year, 1994. It was founded under the name of Mosaic Communications Corporation. The company's first product, Mosaic Netscape was launched in October of 1994. Within months of the browser's release it had taken over the browser market. This browser was subsequently renamed to Netscape Navigator as the company name had been changed from Mosaic to Netscape. Netscape took over the web and became dominant until the first browser war when IE or Internet Explorer came to town. IE destroyed all the browsers including Navigator. Netscape later moved on to become and influence Mozilla.

Back to JavaScript

Sun had just released Java, a language for "smart appliances". Sun partnered with Netscape, which meant the Sun had acquired the use of a competitive browser and delivery system. Netscape on the other hand, had a powerful ally against Microsoft. Netscape also became the first official browser to support the highly anticipated Java programming language. Brendon Eich said that JavaScript was just a companion to Java just as Visual Basic was to C++. The name was just for marketing and JavaScript had no true relations with Java. Netscape had also created Mocha (Which later became JavaScript). Sun never saw JavaScript as a competition and underestimated it, since the web was limited to a lot of things and JavaScript was not what it is today. Fortunately, JavaScript grew to quickly become the web "companion" of Java.

Later Life (2000s)

JavaScript became popular with the invention of the JSON data format created by Douglas Crockford. A mass of developers emerged who understood the language. The design choices made by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript were not the best. JavaScript grew to be one of the most successful languages and the best and only scripting language for the web. As support for JavaScript grew, and the language expanded, many JavaScript frameworks, most notably Node js and React js came along the way. Technically, Node js is not a framework. It is a runtime of JavaScript written in C++ to create an implementation of JavaScript in the backend. Almost all JavaScript frameworks have been developed based on Node js.

So that was the history of JavaScript in nutshell. If you want an article on any tech stack or programming language or even a tutorial then comment down with what you want. Please react to this post and share it if you liked it. Thanks again. Bye!