JavaScript Weird History

The first Browser

Internet was invented

In 1991, Mosaic was the first web browser invented by Tim Berners-Lee, but at that time there was no JS, they were using DOM or document object type model (but that was not that strong at that time)

Netscape

Andressed graduated and move to California to co-found Netscape in 1994 and within a year he realised that browser needed to be more dynamic and the web designer needed some glue language to make their website more interactive.

First, they turn to the super trendy java programming language from sun Microsystems but they release that idea suck.

1995 — Then plan B was to recruit the guy Brendan Eich and his job is to put Scheme programming language into a browser and maintain a syntax that still resembles java. 10 days later the first version of JS was born but at that time it was called mocha.

Syntactically it was a curly bracket language like java and C but under the hood, it contains the functionality of Scheme, the object orientation of Self, and the syntax of java

Brendan Eich perfectly knew that writing any language in 10 days is impossible but what he didn’t do is write a highly specialized language design only for the browsers of the 90s instead he wrote a flexible, multiparadigm language that developers can use to apply their own language patterns too, but there was a very good chance that language will fail and he has not predicted the extremes developer could take it to over the next 20 years

September 1995 — Mocha where renamed LiveScript and it shipped its first beta release Netscape Navigator 2.0 but later in December they decided to rename it to JavaScript because it sound like a cool lightweight cousin to the hottest programming language of that day

Microsoft

Aug 1996 — Microsoft reverse engineered the js language n their marketing team and rename it jQuery so in 1996 we have almost 2 identical languages and the internet growing rapidly people thought that there needed to be standardized javascript

So Netscape turn to the European computer manufacturers association(ECMA) which serves as a neutral party since 1961 for setting standards in IT industries

By June of 1997, we have the first version of ECMAscript and this gave browser vendors of service users a certain guideline for implementing the javascript language (at that time we didn’t have an exception handler or strict equality checks)

ECMA V3

December — 1999, ECMA v3 introduce — it contains better error handling and strict equality operator

• Added regular expressions
• Added try/catch
• Added switch
• Added do-while

AJAX

Ajax was also born around ECMA V3, It was based on asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which was a precursor to a modern-day single application

ECMA V4

In early 2000 work was started on ECMAScript v4 was going in the direction which more look like a modern-day typescript with features like optional type annotations, classes, interface, and a bunch of other feature designs to use js at the enterprise scale

Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) was concerned that the ES4 proposal became very large and out of control, Microsoft actually agree with him and ultimately refuse to have any part in the ES4 proposal, and this alter in writing 2 proposals at the same time ES3.1 and ES4. Version 3.1 was much simpler without major changes to the language this saga continue all the way till 2008 when ES4 was finally scrapped for good and never released, but it did find its way into the market called “Actionscript” developed by adobe as a scripting language supported by flash.

Tech bubble burst

In march 2000 tech bubble started to burst the Nasdaq lost over trillion dollars and high-profile companies started to fold

Internet was still there, Netscape was acquired by AOL a year prior

Release of JQuery

Developers from mind 2000s trying to build web applications that will run on all browsers but we saw a huge leap forward in 2006 with the release of JQuery.

It was the first js library that have extremely well-done documentation and encouraged developers to build far more complicated and interactive applications that will work far more reliably on all browsers.

Release of google chrome and V8 engine

Then we saw another big event on September 2008 with the release of google chrome and the V8 engine.

V8 totally change the way js was compiled and interpret, making it a viable option for high-performance applications both on the browser and server-side.

ES5 (ECMA 2009)

ES5 version was introduced, with new features like

• JSON support
• Functional array and object method
• Strict mode
• Multi-line string
• Array helper functions
• Accessors and many others

NodeJS born (javascript everywhere paradigm)

In May of 2009 Ryan Daly introduced nodeJS, a server type that runs on js built on top of V8 that included an event loop, which was a unique concept of that time that help you to write event-driven and non-blocking code, and because of those characteristics nodeJS become known as a great solution for building a real-time web application that scale and it also made possible for a developer to build their entire web application stack with a single programming language known commonly as a javascript everywhere paradigm

Backbone and angular js

In 2010, we started to see a javascript framework designed specifically for single-page applications.

Backbone was lightweight and help to handle DOM updates with an imperative programming style

AngularJs was all-inclusive and use a declarative programming style

Transpiling introduced

Created of backbone Jermy Ashe Kenneth who created underscore js and CoffeeScript the first language that made Transpiling go mainstream.

ES6 (ECMA 2015)

Brendon Eich’s original vision in 1995 to create a programming language that was malleable and Transpiling become very important with the next version of javascript ES6 aka ES 2015 and a ton of new features landed in this version

• Promises
• Let and const
• Arrow function
• Spread operator
• Destructuring
• Classes
• Modules

This new feature was a forward leap for new js developers but it was hard for a developer to use them because it was not supported by many legacy browsers so that is why we can see prolific use of babel and typescript because they can target any flavor of javascript, going all the back to ES3, while the developer can still write the code with modern features.

Rise of react js

2015 rise of react js happened which was developed by Facebook.

It took some of the concepts of AngularJS with the declarative UI and improved them with the unidirectional dataflow immutability and use of the virtual DOM and it’s really the framework that solidifies modern-day declarative UI patterns.

ECMA 2017

Some of the new features include

• Javascript async and await
• Object.getOwnPropertyDescription
• String padding

ECMA 2018

Some of the new features include

• Asynchronous iteration
• Promise Finally
• New RegExp feature
• Shared memory
• Object Rest property

ECMA 2019

Some of the new features include

• Some trim operations for string
• Optional catch binding
• Revised sort() algorithm
• Revised JSON.stringfy()

ECMA 2020

Some of the new features include

• Some Nullish Coalescing Operator

This is all about Javascript history. I hope you have found this useful. Thank you for reading.