A brief history and evolution of JavaScript

English, Mandarin, and JavaScript are the top three languages in the world in terms of popularity.

When one looks at the wide field of software development, JavaScript is the most notable scripting language. Over the years, Javascript has been increasingly popular despite a number of obstacles.

Examining JavaScript's development and history will help us understand why it has grown to be the most widely used programming language worldwide.

History- Javascript

The World Wide Web was created in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This first web browser version only worked on the proprietary version of NeXT computers.

Before the mid-1990s, the web was not much of a significant force. There was no primary language in the space other than HTML, the primary means of making web pages.

To change this, the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released the world's first popular web browser, the NCSA Mosaic.

Founded by Marc Andreessen and other former NCSA employees and developers, Netscape was a rival to Mosaic. They released the Netscape Navigator, a different web browser. However, the web sites in this browser were static and it was slow. They worked with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language and employed Brendan Eich to embed the Schema language in order to resolve issue.

Brendan spent ten days in 1995 creating the initial iteration of JavaScript, known as Mocha. Soon after, a superior version known as LiveScript was made available. JavaScript replaced LiveScript as the term for marketing purposes because Java was the most popular programming language at the time. It was made available in December of 1995.

Evolution of JavaScript Frameworks - at a glance

JavaScript Development

Microsoft released JScript in 1996; it was based on LiveScript but differed greatly in several important ways. Therefore, in order to build a standardised API in Internet Explorer and Netscape, websites have to either support a certain browser over others or rely on large code libraries.

Netscape submitted JavaScript to ECMA International in November 1996 in an effort to standardise the language and encourage developers to use it.

This led to the creation of ECMAScript, which has been the industry standard for JavaScript ever since and makes use of the majority of the original syntax. ECMA produced ECMAScript 1.0 (today known as JavaScript) in 1997. The next year saw the release of ECMAScript 2.0, or ES2, which had some minor modifications made to it to comply with the ISO standards for the language.

Even though JavaScript was being used by developers all over the world, creating webpages for Internet Explorer and Netscape was time-consuming. ES3, which was released in December 1999, eighteen months after ES2, addressed this.

The regular expression and exception handling elements of the language were introduced in ECMAScript 3, along with a host of other enhancements. After ES3 was released, plans to construct ES4 were revealed right away, but they were quickly shelved in 2003 when the project was declared closed.

Although ECMAScript 4 was shelved, ES5, the replacement for ECMAScript 3, was introduced in 2009 and included a host of additional features, including the ability to pair with JSON files. The ECMAScript 6 standard was renamed ECMAScript 2015 upon its publication in 2015, and this naming convention has persisted for the most recent JavaScript standard updates.

At the time of writing, ECMAScript 2022 is the latest version of JavaScript set to release later this year.

Frameworks and Core of the language

JavaScript frameworks have been a crucial part of its evolution and popularity.

DHTML

The first framework of JavaScript was released in 1997 and was called DHTML and was released in internet explorer 4.0

It is the combination of HTML, CSS, JS, and DOM. The DHTML uses a Dynamic object model to make changes in settings, properties, and methods.

DHTML does the same job that you use CSS to do today and its pages are request/reload-based. It is also considered the predecessor of Ajax.

jQuery

Many developers relied on large code libraries to bridge the gaps between different web browsers because JavaScript was not well supported by web browsers.

The largest of these libraries was jQuery. It was designed to assist programmers in creating complex web pages and was first launched in 2006. This was a significant development for JavaScript since it greatly simplified the writing of the language and added much-needed cross-browser interoperability. JavaScript and jQuery were once thought to be interchangeable, but that all changed in 2013 with the advent of ReactJs.

ReactJs

Before React, people utilised plain JavaScript or libraries and frameworks like jQuery. However, with the release of ReactJs in 2013, this all changed. React is a front-end library that is open source and alone handles the view layer of the application. Facebook (now meta) developed React, which was then used into the mobile applications for Facebook and WhatsApp.

It changed JavaScript's capabilities completely, not just enhanced them. Its ability to alter templates in jsx—a JavaScript syntax extension—and dynamically update data anytime you make changes was one of its benefits.

AngularJs

AngularJS was a JavaScript framework developed in 2009 for single-page applications (SPAs). An SPA is a site that dynamically rewrites a page rather than loading whole new pages for each change. It provides a complete architecture for front-end applications for its developers. Angular JS was developed by Google and maintained by them until it was replaced with Angular2.

As JavaScript became mainstream, the need arose for a way to run it outside of a browser. Node.JS, a set of tools for running JavaScript server-side was also part of this.

NodeJs

NodeJs played a crucial role in changing the course of Javascript history. It was released in 2009 as a part of chrome's version of JavaScript. Node.js allowed developers to use JavaScript to make web servers, command-line tools, and more. NodeJs runs memory efficient programming which is single-threaded & asynchronous and is also non-blocking.

Instead of blocking the thread and wasting CPU cycles waiting, while performing tasks such as performing an I/O operation, reading from the network, accessing a database or the filesystem. Node.js will resume the operations when the response comes back.

Today, Node.js serves as one of the world's most used server-side development technologies. It brings dynamism to JavaScript's client-side-focused nature.

Where are we with JavaScript now?

Work on the language has continued for many years, culminating in an extensive collection of additions and refinements formalized with the publication of ECMAScript 12 in June 2021.

The current JavaScript ecosystem has many libraries, frameworks, established programming practices, and substantial JavaScript usage outside web browsers.

Around 98% of all websites use JavaScript as the dominant client-side scripting language. All major web browsers have a built-in JavaScript engine that executes the code on the user's device.

Why is JavaScript the most popular language in the world?

JavaScript can run almost everywhere, including mobiles, laptops, and computers. This ability makes JavaScript a universal language.

JavaScript has been around for 25 years and has a vast community behind it. It has so many frameworks and plugins that the name "framework fatigue was coined." It enjoys almost universal popularity because it is arguably the only language your browser understands. JavaScript is backward compatible; any website made today will, in theory, work 50 years into the future.

All of these features contribute to its massive popularity. JavaScript is here to stay; the steady growth of the modern frontend network continues to cement its position as one of the most popular coding languages.

Conclusion

JavaScript has come a really long way from being written in 10 days to becoming the most used programming language in the world. It has a long way to go, and the language will continue to become better.

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