A Brief History of the JavaScript Language

We've seen how JavaScript is often integrated within a web environment, but how did this language come about? We need to go back to the early 1990s and understand what the web looked like in those days before we begin talking about JavaScript itself.

The story really begins with Netscape and the web browser they created named Netscape Navigator. This new browser was based on the successful Mosaic web browser with the intent to commercialize it. During that time, and depending on who you speak to, Netscape Navigator was the web browser of choice to develop for. Around the middle of the decade, Microsoft released its Internet Explorer browser, which ignited the first browser wars.

Netscape Mocha and LiveScript

Around this same time, Netscape hired Brendan Eich to develop a programming language for Netscape's web browser. Eich took inspiration from Scheme (Lisp), Self, and most importantly, Java. The work on this language, then called Mocha, was initially (and infamously) completed in the time span of only 10 days. With the initial version completed, Netscape changed their name and began calling it LiveScript.

It turned out that LiveScript, as a language name, was just as temporary as Mocha until Netscape partnered with a certain other large company to advance the idea of a two-pronged approach to web development.

Sun Microsystems and Java

The popular Java language came into play with a partnership between Netscape and Sun Microsystems. Sun was looking at the web as the next step for Java, and Netscape was looking for allies in the coming war against Microsoft, so an allegiance was formed. The language being developed by Eich was from then on named JavaScript as it was meant to work alongside Java in the web browser as a more approachable way to add interactivity to that environment.

This would mean that the Java language would be what serious developers used to write interactive content for the web, while JavaScript would provide similar interactive capabilities but was geared more toward hobbyists and those who wanted to tinker.

Note

What happened, of course, was quite different. JavaScript was integrated into the browser well before Java was, and, once Java came on board, it was only through the use of applets. With Java applets falling out of popularity quite some time ago, we are left with JavaScript alone today and not the two languages that were initially envisioned, though the JavaScript name has stuck.

Ecma International and ECMAScript

Ecma adopted and standardized the specification and renamed the language itself to ECMAScript, with JavaScript becoming the commercial implementation of that specification. Ecma International remains the organization that develops and publishes the ECMAScript specification and all the new versions of it, which eventually influence the JavaScript language.

In this section, we read about how JavaScript came to be and performed a quick exercise that showed how it can be examined live within the web browser itself. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of exactly what JavaScript is, where it came from, and how it operates.

In the next section, we'll look at some more history behind this language by examining the version history of JavaScript beyond ECMA standardization.