The programming language JavaScript emerged 25 years ago and has grown to become one of the most important pieces of the web and browser applications we use today.
JavaScript is the go-to language for front-end development and has spawned Microsoft’s Typescript, a superset of JavaScript with a stronger optional type system for developers that compiles to JavaScript when run in the browser.
Both JavaScript and TypeScript conform to ECMAScript, the standard for JavaScript and node.js, the runtime for running applications outside of the browser thanks to Google’s powerful V8 JavaScript engine.
JavaScript’s impact on the web cannot be understated. Tech giants have thrown their weight behind the language. Besides Google’s V8, there are open-source projects like React from Facebook and Angular from Google, which help spread web applications across smartphones and desktop.
After Netscape and Sun Microsystems – where Java was hatched in May 1995 by James Gosling – announced JavaScript in December 1995, Microsoft promoted Visual Basic (VB) as a standard for creating web applications using VB Script for its Internet Explorer browser. Oracle would go on to buy Sun Microsystems in 2008 largely to get its hands on Java and its huge development ecosystem.
JavaScript’s most important designer is Brendan Eich, a co-founder of Firefox maker Mozilla and now chief of Brave, one of the many browsers based on the Google-led Chromium project. Eich was at Netscape in 1995 when he created a Unix version of Mocha, the precursor to JavaScript.
By Liam Tung | December 4, 2020