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Now JavaScript is everywhere 🌍
Hello 👋 excellent programmer of the Internet 😃. In this article, I’ll give you a quick and comprehensive overview of how the world’s most popular and widely used programming language evolved into what it is today.
Over the years, JavaScript has become the most popular and versatile programming language. Supports over 97% of the Web. As a Web developer, knowing the history of the most popular and popular programming language is a plus and will help enhance your understanding of that language.
1995: The birth of JavaScript
As early as May 1995, the Internet became popular. Back then, the Web was just static pages, often with heavy text and ugly 😌.
The best ones have images floating to the left or right. Compared to today’s web, this is not exciting 🤔
The Web needs to be more dynamic. Animation, interaction, and other forms of small automation need to be the future of the web. To achieve that effect, the Web needs a scripting language that runs in a browser.
Brendan Eich, a programmer at Netscape, was commissioned to make this possible and created the JavaScript programming language (originally called Mocha during development, then changed to LiveScript) in just ten days.
On December 4, 1995, the first version of the JavaScript programming language hit the Internet
1996: JavaScript and Java
Shortly after publication, its name was changed from LiveScript to JavaScript. Many said the reason for the change was to attract developers of another popular programming language, which was very popular at the time. This is a Java.
“Java” in JavaScript is just for marketing reasons 💡
Because the language itself JavaScript has nothing to do with Java! ☝
Java, on the other hand, is a statically typed, compiled programming language. JavaScript is dynamically typed and interpreted at run time. Check out this article for more succinct details on the differences between Java and JavaScript
Many beginners interweave the two languages 👀. But it is not. JavaScript and Java are actually two completely different programming languages.
1997: ECMAScript is born as a JavaScript standard
A year later, in 1997. JavaScript experienced rapid growth as many developers adopted the language and more browsers began to add JavaScript support. Clearly, the language needs to be properly maintained and managed. As a result, Netscape and the language’s developers submitted the JavaScript programming language to the standards body, The European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) International, a Swiss organization that defines international standards for computing. Consider as an industry standard.
EMCA’s technical committee TC39 is the organization behind the standardization of the ECMAScript (JavaScript) specification. TC39 is made up of JavaScript developers, implementators, academics, and others from companies as diverse as Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, and Paypal. Their job is to create, approve, and reject language features, and maintain and evolve JavaScript definitions.
With this, the first standard version of the JavaScript language supported by all browsers, ~ ECMAScript 1, or ES1 as it is commonly called, was released.
In 2009: ES5
In 2009, the JavaScript version ES5 (ECMAScript 5) was released with a number of major new features such as JSON support, getters and setters on objects, new array methods such as forEach and Map, But these features are not yet widely supported across browsers. As a result, it will take several years for browsers to support these features.
As a Web developer, you must understand ES5. Why? 👇
- ES5 is the standard version of JavaScript programming because it is fully supported in all major browsers, such as Internet Explorer.
- Many (old) code bases are still written in ES5.
- It’s better and easier to learn the basics in ES5, then update to ES6 and ESNext.
2015: Annual Forecast Update ~ ES6/ES2015
In June 2015, the much anticipated language version 😄 ES6 was released
This is the biggest update to the language ever!
ES6 brings new syntax and great features to make your code more modern and readable. It allows you to write less code and do more. ES6 introduces many great features, such as arrow functions, template literals, classes, destructors, modules… And so on.
This is a very important thing for the entire JavaScript community.
Since the major release of ES6 in 2015, the TC39 Committee has moved to an annual release cycle. This means that every year a new version of JavaScript is released with only a few new features. Instead of releasing a huge new version every two years, it has a lot of features 😔.
What’s next? ESNext
ESNext is the name of the next version of JavaScript (ECMAScript) to be released.
At the time of this writing, the current ECMAScript version is ES2020(ES11). It was released in June 2020.
JavaScript versions are typically standardized over the summer, so we can expect ECMAScript 2021(ES12) to be released this summer at 😉.
At the time of writing, ES2020(ES11) has been released and ESNext is ES2021(ES12)
Proposals for the ECMAScript standard are organized in stages. Phases 1-3 are an incubator for new features, and features reaching phase 4 will be finalized as part of the new standards.
At the time of writing this article, we have several features in Phase 4. Most of these features should already be implemented in the latest versions of major browsers.
The type of JavaScript
In the industry, you often hear terms like vanilla or plain JavaScript. This is how developers can reference JavaScript without any framework or library. We know that ECMAScript 2015 or ES6 is the standard version of Vanilla JavaScript. But there are other forms of JavaScript as well, for example.
Typescript
Typescript was created by Microsoft as a strict syntactic superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language. Browsers can’t understand files written in Typescript, so they need to be compiled into standard JavaScript code to run.
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript adds syntax sugar to JavaScript to enhance its brevity and readability. It is also not understood by rowers and requires standard JavaScript.
Dart
Dart is an object-oriented JavaScript language developed by Google. Dart is designed to create highly complex and easily scalable applications for the web and mobile devices. Dart has been approved by ECMA like Vanilla JavaScript. Dart uses a different syntax than Vanilla JavaScript, but it can be translated into Vanilla, so it can be used in a browser. Node.js is a cross-platform back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on a V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside of a Web browser.
Node.js
Node.js allows developers to use JavaScript to write both command-line tools and server-side scripts that are run on the server side to generate dynamic Web content before sending the page to the user’s Web browser.
React
React is a JavaScript front-end library for building user interfaces or UI components. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React is primarily used as a basis for developing single-page or mobile applications.
Jquery
Jquery is designed to simplify JavaScript and make it easier to learn. It required a lot of common JavaScript tasks, a lot of code written in Vanilla and wrapped into a single line. Jquery includes features such as DOM traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and even Ajax. Jquery does not require compilation and runs in all major browsers.
Where is JavaScript now
Although JavaScript originated in Web browsers, it has now gone beyond that to become a multi-platform language. Support for all major programming paradigms.
The most common place you encounter JavaScript is on the Web. Developers now use JavaScript to make websites more attractive, such as 3D graphics, animations, transitions, etc. You can also use JavaScript to build mobile applications that run on iOS and Android.
Frameworks like React and Ionic. You can even find JavaScript in desktop applications such as the text editor Visual Studio Code 😏 and popular messaging applications such as Slack. It can be used to control hardware via iot devices.
Roll up
I hope you found this article helpful. You now have a good overview of the history/evolution of the most popular Web programming languages.
This is a topic that can be mentioned in an interview 🤷♂️, so yes, it’s worth knowing
If you’d like to chat or have any questions, please leave them in the comments, I’m always happy to talk.
I hope you learn something new and thank you so much for reading!! ❤ and keep coding! 👨 💻.
Do I enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy blogging for you? 😍
I have been writing a tech blog for a long time and this is one of my tech articles/tutorials. Hope you like it! Here is a summary of all my original and work source code: Github, Gitee
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