Exploring JavaScript: From Its Origins to Modern Developments

Programming is the way of giving instructions to computer to perform some tasks. but Computer does not understand our natural language like English, Hindi, Nepali, Spanish etc. so We used tools to write our instructions which converted into machine code and that understand by computer. These tools are called programming language. Every programming languages has own used . some are low level or some are high level.

Popular programming languages are Javascript, Python, Java, C++, and many more. Each on of them are used on the basis of what we need to develop and build like software development, machine learning, gaming , data analysis etc.

In this article we discussed about the JavaScript one of most popular language which is widely used from browser to server, web app to mobile app, desktop app, machine code and more .

Beginning of world

In 1995, Brendan Eich was hired to develop one lightweight scripting language to add interactivity in Netscape navigator browser. it was initially developed in just 10 days and since evolved to become one of the widely used programming language.

Initially it was named Mocha. then changed to LiveScript . In that days Java was widely famous and everyone talking about that so to bring on the eyes of people . It was named JavaScript. However Both are different paradigm language There are no any similarity and Both have different take and purpose.

The microsoft developed its own JScript. and many other browser implement their own Javascript so to bring consistency on the use of JavaScript. Netscape submitted for standardization to ECMA International and The standard specification built and written for Javascript is known as ECMAScript(ECMA-262) and the first edition was released in June 1997.

ES3

It was released in December 1999, It added the features of Regex, try/catch block and new string methods. which makes it more serious programming language.

In 2005, AJAX and Web 2.0 enables the dynamic contents updates without full page loads. It helps in making applications like Gmail and Google maps much more interaction and dynamic apps.

V8 Engine and NodeJs

In 2008, Google released chrome browser with high performance V8 Javascript engine. which complied Javascript code directly to machine code. We can run Javascript directly on browser due to this engine in chrome. It was open source so Ryan Dahl takeout the V8 engine and wraps with C++ bindings and create the Javascript run time environment to run Javascript outside the browser for the first time. That is NodeJs . There are large package directories with millions of packages called NPM.

and by this It opens the gate so we can used Javascript to build server side apps which makes Javascript more powerful.

Modern Javascript (2010- present)

The major updates comes in ES6 in 2015. It brought many changes in language. There are addition of many features which enables today way of writing Javascript in much more cleaner and modular way. Features like (let/const, Classes, Modules,arrow function, promises) making it more robust for large applications. The standard committee (TC39) then shifted to release update or some new addition of smaller features on every year.

The Frameworks and Libraries

The Javascript capture all over the Software development field. so In 2010s saw the rise of powerful libraries and frameworks like Angular JS, then on 2013 the most favorite among many developers The React introduces by facebook, and on 2014 Vue.js. These are JavaScript frameworks and libraries that simplified the development of single page applications easy . The frontend engineers do their job on these tools.

TypeScript:

In 2012 Microsoft introduced the strict type of Javascript which is superset of Javascript . it is Typescript. It add type safety and make it more less error and bug free on writing Javascript in large codebase.

Summary

This is the journey of Javascript to become the most used programming language. It is High level Programming Language so it is most human friendly to learn and write the code and It helps to develop the software, server side backend , mobile apps, games, CLI tools , whatever you can think all the things can be done with JS .

The ecosystem of JavaScript is really very vast . you can find any tools, packages to do specific tasks on NPM which makes it more easy to build software in JavaScript.