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JavaScript Introduction

JavaScript was created around April 1995 by Brendan Eich, who at the time was working on an early browser in a company called Netscape1. He was told that he only had 10 days to design and code a working prototype of a programming language that can run on the browser. His requirement is that the language would appeal to nonprofessional programmers like Microsoft Visual Basic (which had at least a year of design and development from 1990 to 1991) and interpretable for easy embedding in webpages.

The reason he was given only 10 days is because Netscape need to release its browser, which at the time was at war with Microsoft, over web browser market share.

In the beginning, JavaScript was not as powerful as it is today, since it was mainly used to add interaction and animation for web pages. It wasn’t until 2005 when jQuery and AJAX was released that JavaScript saw rise in popularity. jQuery and AJAX simply had no alternative technology to compete with in terms of browser interactivity, DOM manipulation and asynchronous request. Plus, there is a very active community of developers maintaining and updating these libraries.

With Google taking initiative to launch modern browser that’s far more capable than any other browser, and Facebook getting people online left and right (if only to use Facebook,) JavaScript had the responsibility to grow as well, to accommodate the ambitions of these successful Internet companies.

Browsers began developing APIs that can be used by JavaScript. It can retrieve information such as IP address and geographic location from the browser, while also storing information in the browser’s local storage.

Then another innovation happened.

A server side environment named Node.js was released into the world in 2009, unlocking JavaScript capabilities to be used in backend and server side development. That makes JavaScript a competitor to long time server side programming language such as Java, Python, Ruby, PHP and many more. It also enables the development of full stack web application using only JavaScript.

JavaScript is now a language that can power the web, mobile and desktop applications. It can also interact with databases and embedded into devices.

Initiative had also been taken to make JavaScript a viable technology for machine learning and artificial intelligence development.

Here is a quote from Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media:

Learning JavaScript used to mean you weren’t a serious software developer. Today, not learning JavaScript means the same thing.

And so JavaScript became the most popular one programming language for web development today.

Why Learn JavaScript

These are 4 reasons to learn and use JavaScript:

  • The only language supported by browsers.
  • Easy to learn (but hard to master!)
  • Essential for making web application.
  • Lots of career opportunities.

As stated by Tim O’Reilly above, you can't become a respected software developer without at least mastering JavaScript basics.

JavaScript and Java

In the beginning, JavaScript was actually named LiveScript, but then renamed to JavaScript because Java was very popular at the time. Since most software developers are already familiar with Java and its qualities, the name JavaScript was thought to help in marketing JavaScript as a great programming language and draw the interest of developers at the time.

Footnotes

  1. JavaScript: Designing a Language in 10 Days https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/2012/02/mco2012020007.pdf ↩