History of JavaScript – JavaScript is gaining popularity Day by Day

Hello readers, you are here that means you already know what is JavaScript and how popular JavaScript is now.
But JavaScript has a long history. JavaScript was not as famous as you are seeing it now. It takes time to evolve and gain popularity in the web designer community. Now JavaScript is spreading the popularity of itself in the developer’s world too.

So, In this article, I will discuss and focus on several things those are mentioned below.

• What is the history of JavaScript?
• How did JavaScript get attention?
• Implementations
• What particular thing is the game changer for JavaScript?
• Today’s JavaScript
• Future of JavaScript

History of JavaScript – From the very first

JavaScript’s birth name was not JavaScript. I will explain the evolution in this section. The birthplace of JavaScript was Netscape. how and when? take a look down:

In 1993 NCSA Mosaic ( It is known as the first popular graphical web browser ) was released and expanded in a very short time, you can say no 1 browser in the world. In 1993 the JavaScript was not there.
A newly founded company named Mosaic communications started creating a new browser with the help of NCSA original employees in 1994. (  Mosaic communications hired some of the NCSA employees )
They give it a name – “Mosaic Netscape”

Now I hope you are getting the point of creating a browser with the help of the employees. Mosaic Communications motivation was to displace the position of NCSA Mosaic from the no 1 position. The code name for the newly created browser made by Mosaic Communication was internally Mozilla and people often called it Mosaic Killer.

Within only 4 months this browser grabbed the 75% browser market and this lead the browser to be the main browser in the world. They thought that tradename problem may arise in the future so they changed the name to Netscape Navigator.

This is the time when the idea of JavaScript was launched. The company felt that there should an easy language or script that can be written in the webpage markup directly by the designers or part-time programmers to assemble components of a webpage.

Need to had a scripting language – Idea of JavaScript came

Netscape Navigator became more popular day by day. The company got enough money in their hand to move forward. They were competing with NCSA Mosaic. Now Netscape Navigator’s owners feel that they need something new and cool to beat NCSA Mosaic. They started thinking of making web pages dynamic.

in 1995, the Netscape Communications hired Brendan Eich to add a new Scheme programming language to Netscape Navigator. But the Netscape Communications ( Mosaic Communications changed their name to Netscape Communications ) collaborated with Sun Microsystems so that they could include Sun Microsystems’ Java in Netscape Navigator.

Brendan eich ( img source wikipedia )

Then they felt that they should try to use a language where the syntax will be similar to Java. They needed a prototype now. Brendan Eich created that in 10 days. That was May 1995.

JavaScript was launched but the name was Mocha. In the later version of Netscape Navigator ( version 2.0 ) The script was first added as LiveScript. later, they give it a name JavaScript. The naming showed a good marketing strategy at that time. As the name includes Java in the prefix. But actually, the JavaScript is not related to Java in any way. Now just think it, if a webpage looks cool and dynamic with JavaScript, then what will happen with the page when you will open it with some other browser that does not support JavaScript. Microsoft’s internet explorer launched their own scripting language known as JScript. Don’t get confused, the name might look like same but they are different. They did not use the name Java in the prefix, maybe for trademark issue that might have been arisen.

Guess The Number Game Using JavaScript

Became Popular as Server-side Script Soon

In December 1994 Netscape first launched Server-side scripting known as Netscape Enterprise Server.
To get requests from the clients of a web page and give response to each request in real time without compromising the speed and performance, JavaScript introduced Server-side scripting. There were Java, .NET and other languages those were mature enough to handle Server side of a web page. But to deal with real-time Server-side tasks by establishing the whole setup with those mature popular programming languages would be very costly. Netscape knew it and JavaScript Server-side scripting launched.

Now we all know about Node.js it has become very popular. Node.js was launched in 2009 as a Server-side script and grab the market in a very short time.

Click the link to check the list of server-side JavaScript implementations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_server-side_JavaScript_implementations

Game Changer – JavaScript

Microsoft’s implementations of JavaScript in JScript was seen in Internet Explorer 3. But the implementations were not exact or accurate. Thus it became hard for the designers to make a webpage look same for both the Netscape’s browser and other browsers.

You are obviously an Internet user and you have seen many websites (especially in the early ages ) that are showing you logos or texts something like saying “Best experience in IE” or “Best Experience in Mozilla”.

It was a roadblock to a cross-platform web and this single reason was enough to acquire Netscape a good reputation. Just think it deeply, if the designer is using JavaScript to create a dynamic webpage that looks cool on Netscape but not looks well or same in IE. Obviously, the webpage visitors will go for Netscape’s browser.

Today’s JavaScript

All the modern browsers now support JavaScript having built-in interpreters. JavaScript has become a very popular language. Statistics say that the number of JavaScript developers has increased since last few years rapidly.

For the dynamic nature of JavaScript, it is gaining popularity day by day. Even Facebook has created their own JavaScript library React which is now very popular all over the world.

Google has introduced the Angular JS framework which is also popular all over the world.

JavaScript was first launched just to be a Scheme but later it has gained so much popularity and loved by a large number of designers and developers.

Yes, it is right that we have a lot of JS haters but still, it is growing up day by day. Because it is open source, it allows us to extend it with the help of libraries and frameworks. JavaScript supports most of the structured programming syntax like the if-else statement, do-while loop, for loop, switch statement etc.
The JSON ( JavaScript object notation ) also gained popularity.

In a nutshell, today’s web pages are using JavaScript massively.

Future of JavaScript

By looking at today’s JavaScript I can say that most of the developers and designers are not using their own handwritten vanilla JavaScript ( the JavaScript that is not extended by any library or framework ). Technologies are moving faster than we can imagine. In future time will be more important to us and we gonna become more concerned about time management. Thus we will use JavaScript more as a VM than a scripting language. The text written in bold is introduced by any developers.

So we can say that JavaScript will move forward with the help of great innovations of libraries and frameworks. Actually, JavaScript is not going anywhere but the optimizing compilers are going to be more advanced.

No one imagined that JavaScript will be grown up to this level and will gain so much popularity. But it is reality JavaScript is now one of the reputed languages. But in future JavaScript will be treated and known as a VM more than a language.

If you like this article or feel anything I should mention please feel free to put your comment in the comment section below.