The Evolution of JavaScript

The Three most well known languages in the world are English, Mandarin, and JavaScript.

Looking at the vast world of software development, the scripting language that stands out is JavaScript. Despite facing multiple challenges, Javascript has gained much popularity over the years.

Let's dive into the history and evolution of JavaScript and see why it has become the most popular coding language in the world.

History- Javascript

The World Wide Web was created in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This first web browser version only worked on the proprietary version of NeXT computers.

Before the mid-1990s, the web was not much of a significant force. There was no primary language in the space other than HTML, the primary means of making web pages.

To change this, the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released the world's first popular web browser, the NCSA Mosaic.

National Center of Supercomputing Applications - Mosaic

Mosaic's competition was a company called Netscape, built by Marc Andreessen and many former NCSA employees and developers. They rolled out another web browser called the Netscape Navigator. But this browser was slow, and its web pages were static. They solved this by collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language and hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Schema language.

In 1995, Brendan created the first version of JavaScript-called Mocha, in ten days. A better version was soon released and was called LiveScript. Due to marketing reasons, the name was changed from LiveScript to JavaScript, as Java was the programming language trending at that time. This was released in December 1995.

Evolution of JavaScript Frameworks - at a glance

JavaScript Development

In 1996, Microsoft released JScript, which was based on LiveScript but had many fundamental differences. As a result, websites must either support one browser over another or rely on extensive code libraries to create a standardized API in Internet Explorer and Netscape.

In November 1996, Netscape submitted JavaScript to ECMA International to standardize JavaScript and get it adopted by developers.

Standardized code snippet for javascript

This brought about ECMAScript, which uses most of JavaScript's original syntax and has served as the standard for JavaScript ever since. In 1997, ECMA released ECMAScript 1.0, which is now referred to as JavaScript. ECMAScript 2.0 or ES2 was released the following year with minor changes to keep up with the ISO standards for the language.

Even though developers were adopting JavaScript worldwide, building websites for Netscape and internet explorer was tedious. This was addressed by ES3, which came out in December 1999, 18 months after ES2.

ECMAScript 3 features many changes and introduced the language's regular expression and exception handling features that we see today. Plans to build ES4 were announced immediately after the release of ES3, but they were soon abandoned in 2003 when the project was announced closed.

While ECMAScript 4 was abandoned, the successor to ECMAScript 3 called ES5 was released in 2009 with many new features and the ability to pair with JSON files. ECMAScript 6 was released in 2015 but was renamed ECMAScript 2015, and this naming pattern has continued for the latest releases of the JavaScript standard.

At the time of writing, ECMAScript 2022 is the latest version of JavaScript set to release later this year.