Evolution of JavaScript

Like all things existing, there is a beginning and javascript is no different. Javascript came into being in the year 1995 and has kept on evolving ever since. Brendan Eich, an employee at Netscape communications, created and released javascript in 1995. He cited Java, scheme and self as his source of inspiration. En passant, even though Java may have inspired the creation of javascript, they have literally nothing in common.

Javascript was initially referred to as Netscape’s Mocha during its development but was officially released with the name ‘LiveScript.’ It was later renamed to javascript when it was deployed in the Netscape Navigator 2.0 beta 3 that same year.

In the year 1997, Ecma International, an organization that creates standards for technologies, released ECMAScript (official javascript language specification). This was done after Netscape submitted javascript to them to carve out a standard specification for the language. So to clear the confusion that most people have, javascript is a programming language while ECMAScript is a scripting language specification. Over the years, ECMA has released subsequent standards like Es2015 or Es6 which was released in the year 2015 and the rest. Like I said earlier, these are JS specifications and should not be referred to javascript versions.

But what is javascript? Javascript is a high-level scripting language that is usually interpreted by the browser. It can also be used on the server side (node.js). Javascript main functions and applications include;

Due to the open source nature of JS, numerous powerful frameworks have been deployed over the years. Some of the most popular ones include React, Angular, Vue, React native, Ionic, Electron.js, etc. Node.js, which is used for server-side applications is not a framework but a run time environment.

By the way, a framework in simple terms is a standard which is used to build and deploy applications. Lets now take a look at how browsers handle javascript files and render web pages.

JS popularity and dominance of the web required most browsers to have javascript engines in their system. Below are a list of browsers and their javascript engines;

These engines are used by their respective browsers to interpret and execute javascript codes. A browser also uses DOM interpreter (Document Object Model) to execute HTML or XML documents. The CSS compiler is also used to execute CSS files. These are known as JIT (just in time) compilers. Since our computers do not understand the language in which our source code is written, JIT compilers first convert the human-readable language to byte code and parse it to the computer to execute.

In summary, javascript is a very versatile language with its abilities increasing by the day making it one of the best programming languages in existence.

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