A brief history of JavaScript

Creator of JavaScript Brendan Eich developed JavaScript in 1995 in just 10 days, originally named Mocha, then LiveScript and later JavaScript.

Java was very popular at that time, so it was decided that positioning a new language as a “younger brother” of Java would help.

Running Java programs, the code must be first compiled into an executable form. But JavaScript was created to be interpreted at run time, making it much more dynamic.

JavaScript became a fully independent language with its own specification called ECMAScript, a body founded with the goal of standardizing computing and now it has no relation to Java at all.

Lightweight means that the language does not take too much memory of the computer and it has a relatively simple syntax. It can be used cross-platforms which means it executes not only the browser but also on servers.

Browsers have embedded engine sometimes called “JavaScript virtual machine”, how an engine works:

it reads(parses) the script
then converts(compile)the script to the machine language
and then machine code runs, fast!

JavaScript made modern web development possible, used to create and control dynamic website content, i.e. anything that moves, refreshes, or otherwise changes on your screen without requiring you to manually reload a web page.

Trio fantastico HTML, CSS and JavaScript form the backbone of web development.

HTML is responsible for content
CSS for representation styling and laying out elements on the web page
JS allows you to add dynamic on the web page.

How does JavaScript work?
There are two ways how we can add JavaScript to our website.
The first one is adding an online script tag into our HTML file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>JavaScript Blog</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <h1>JavaScript</h1>
  </body>

  <script>console.log("Hello World!")</script>

</html>

Open up index.html and inspect/console
You should see “Hello world!” printed out.

The second one is adding an external JS file, in this case, I made a new external file script.js. and added to index.html

<script src="/script.js"></script>

Brendan Eich’s 10-day coding spree is the most important sprint in the history of computing.
Today JavaScript has become one of the most used programming languages.

Blog

A brief history of JavaScript

Tadea Simunovic

Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.

Related