Introduction to JavaScript

Javascript

By the end of this article, you will know all about the origin of Javascript, its need and the revolutions it brought.

What is Javascript?

In terms of Wikipedia, JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the Web, alongside HTML and CSS. 99% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine that executes the client code.

But you and me can consider this as a tool to talk to the servers and browsers, who don't know our language(for most of us, one of the languages is English) and we don't know there's, i.e., the assembly code or the binary language.

Need to develop a language like Javascript?

Now as we all know, web is older than Javascript. Hence, we can conclude that there were some languages that drove the web. Now it is a general human nature to ask, that when we had something that was already working, why did we develop anything new to do the same work, right?

The answer to this lies in the initial days of the web. So let's get some flashback here, shall we?

So in the initial days of the web or formally the World Wide Web web pages were all static with no functionalities, not even submitting a form.

It was just as if you got something from the server and you don't have any other way except learning some scripting language to talk back to the server. Also, the web browsers were kind of terminal based.

  • So, to tackle all this, the developers of Mosaic, one of the first GUI browsers, in collaboration with the Sun Microsystems the founders of Java and an individual named Brendan Eich created a programming language with the syntax same as that of Java was introduced in the Naviagator Beta release, a successor to the orignal Mosaic browser.
The original name of Javascript was "LiveScript"

  • Then in 1995, with the release of Internet Explorer(the legend), started the war between NetScape and Microsoft, where miscrosoft released a programming language under the name of JScript.

  • Then the web saw the rise of ECMAScript and ECMAScript for XML.

  • Then near 2008, we saw the release of Google Chrome with the V8 engine.

  • By 2009, Ryan Dahl released NodeJS, which comprised of V8 engine, I/O APIs, and event tools. This provides a standalone runtime for Javascript.

  • By 2024, Javascript is widely supported and is used by millions of developers in the world.

By 2024, anyone who is doing web developement is knowingly or unknowingly uses JavaScript.