2. History of JavaScript.

2. History of JavaScript.

To understand what I am about to tell you, you need to travel back in time with me, precisely to the year 1995, when JavaScript was created.

JavaScript at Netscape.

Brendan Eich developed JavaScript at Netscape Communications in 1995. Netscape and Eich created JavaScript as a scripting language for use with Netscape Navigator, the company's flagship web browser. Originally known as LiveScript, Netscape changed the name to JavaScript to position it as a companion to Sun Microsystems' Java language. JavaScript, aside from some superficial syntactic similarities, is unrelated to the Java programming language.

Following its release, an increasing number of browsers began to support JavaScript. Nonetheless, JavaScript was not regarded as a serious programming language for much of its history. Its early releases had significant performance and security issues, but developers had no choice. They had to use JavaScript if they wanted to run programs in the browser.

The V8 Engine.

The release of Google's open-source Chrome V8, a high-performance JavaScript engine, in 2008 marked a watershed moment for JavaScript. The subsequent proliferation of fast JavaScript engines enabled developers to create sophisticated browser-based applications that competed with desktop and mobile applications in terms of performance.

The Birth of NodeJs.

Soon after, Ryan Dahl released Node.js, an open-source, cross-platform environment. It allowed you to run JavaScript code from outside of a browser. It liberated JavaScript from the constraints of the browser and contributed directly to JavaScript's current popularity. JavaScript can now be used to create a wide range of applications, including browser, server, mobile, and desktop applications. JavaScript is used in the products of the majority of major online companies today, including Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Google.

Where will JavaScript Be in 10 years?

JavaScript has come a long way since its initial implementation, which took only 10 days to complete. The JavaScript standard, first proposed as ECMAScript 1 in 1997, is now in its ninth iteration as of late 2018. (ES 2018). The differences between ECMAScript 1 and ES 2018 specifications are enormous: they appear to describe different languages. JavaScript has evolved dramatically in the intervening years. Although not everyone agreed with every change, they all contributed to JavaScript becoming a more robust, secure, and expressive language.

The JavaScript community of today is arguably the most active community in programming. It sometimes seems that every week sees releases of new tools, frameworks, and libraries. There are preprocessors and transpilers of all sorts available, ranging from programs that translate modern JavaScript programs so older JavaScript engines can run them, to compiling entirely new languages with JavaScript. The JavaScript standard itself is a continuously evolving document, with improvements introduced at a rapid rate. JavaScript engines incorporate the changes almost as rapidly. New operating systems under development (e.g., Google's Fuchsia) are adding support for the development of native applications in JavaScript. All of this means that JavaScript has an exciting future. It's a great time to learn JavaScript!

Source:

This article is heavily inspired by this post A brief Javascript History by Launch School