Javascript: A Brief History

Javascript was introduced by Netscape in the mid-1990s as a language to support dynamic websites. At that time, websites were static and lacked the ability to perform any dynamic actions. In response, Netscape asked Brenden Eich and Sun Systems to develop a language that could be embedded in web pages to support dynamic behavior on Navigator. This language was originally called Livescript, but it was later renamed to Javascript to capitalize on the marketing of Java.

When Microsoft introduced its own browser, Internet Explorer, it also developed its own version of HTML and Javascript, which some sources say was achieved through reverse engineering of Netscape’s Navigator. Microsoft called its version of the embedded webpage language JScript. JScript and Javascript were different enough that developers had to add signs such as “works best on IE” or “works best on Navigator” to their sites due to the differences in the languages.

In an effort to standardize Javascript, Netscape submitted a request to ECMA, an organization responsible for standardizing technologies related to information and communication. As a result, standardized versions of Javascript were published as ECMAScript.

ES1-3 were released year by year, but there were problems that hindered the release of ES4. Some of the proposed features from ES4 were eventually included in ES5, which was released in 2009, a full 10 years after the release of ES3. In 2015, ES6 was released, featuring major updates such as classes, modules, and arrow functions. Since 2015, there have been annual releases with additional features added to the language.

Now that we have a sense of Javascript’s history and its relationship to ECMA, the organization responsible for managing the standard that browsers try to implement or conform to, let’s consider what Javascript is and how it differs from other languages.

In Arabic, there is an expression that says “through opposites, the reality of things are known.” In the next blog post we will explore the features that make Javascript unique and different from other languages. As a bonus while we are at it we also cover the categories that we can define for a language and pin point where Javascript falls in those categories.