A Short Paper Regarding the History of JavaScript
This is a short paper I wrote regarding the history of JavaScript.
JavaScript was released in May 1995 and was constructed in ten days by Brenden Eich. The original name of the language was Mocha and later called LiveScript but after being acquired by Sun through a trademark license it came to be known as JavaScript. For standard specification JavaScript was first taken the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) in 1996 for standard specification upon which the language was officially listed in the standard as ECMAScript. In 1998 ECMAScript 2 was released and in 1999 ECMAScript 3 was released. ECMAScript 3.1 was renamed to ECMAScript 5 in 2009 and the current stable release is ECMAScript 6.
Brenden Eich the original developer of JavaScript, was working at Netscape Communications Corporation when he developed the language. Netscape wanted to create a portable version of Sun Microsystems’ Java that would be easier to develop in for nonprofessional programmers. JavaScript can run on a wide range of platforms but it is most commonly used websites for frontend and backend scripting. JavaScript was originally intended to be used as a client-side language but now it is has also emerged as a viable server side language with the introduction of platforms such as Node.js. With the adoption of JavaScript for server side scripting the language has seen growth in usage across a multitude of platforms and fields including but not limited to: operating systems, robotics, and commercial electronics.
JavaScript has many unique features one that strikes out is that the language can be run in a browser, this feature alone is a reason why the language has gained such popularity among the software and information technology community. Another feature is that the language can be run on both server and client side this makes it possible for entire backends to be written with exclusively JavaScript. JavaScript is also both a functional and object oriented programming language and makes it easy to work with callbacks.
In a browser by default JavaScript runs on a user interface thread but third party APIs and plugins can be utilized to support multithreading in JavaScript. Node.js, the I/O server side environment based on the V8 JavaScript runtime has support for handling concurrent operations.
In five years I can only see this language getting better in terms of syntactical structure and just general ease of use. With the widespread adoption of JavaScript on the server side, in five years many major companies may decide (and are today) to write a lot of their web infrastructure in JavaScript. JavaScript is currently in the top ten (RedMonk, 2015) on most widely used programming languages and given its track record it seems that it is not going to be leaving that spot anytime soon.
References
A Short History of JavaScript. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2015,
from https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_JavaScript
JavaScript. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
Most Popular Programming Languages of 2015. (2015, July 7).
Retrieved September 3, 2015, from https://blog.newrelic.com/2015/07/07/popular-programming-languages/
Node.js. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2015, from https://nodejs.org/en/