7 things you didn't know about the history of JavaScript!

In 2020, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Javascript language, which today remains the only programming language (strictly speaking) running natively on all browsers.

But Javascript's history has been eventful, it went from being considered a second-rate language to the forefront of the scene in just a few years, notably with the arrival of jQuery, NodeJS and then all the modern frameworks we know today.

But let's go back in time a bit to discover a few fun facts about this language that still divides opinion today.

#1 - Javascript was not born on December 4, 1995

In 1995, Netscape Corporation, the publisher of the most popular web browser at the time, decided to integrate a scripting language into the next version of their software. Brendan Eich was hired to create a new interpreted language with a syntax similar to that of Java, whose internal code name would be "Mocha".

In September 1995, the new version of Netscape was released, accompanied by this new language then called "Livescript" but which three months later would be renamed "Javascript", partly to ride the wave of Java's explosive success at the time.

#2 - Microsoft had to reverse-engineer Javascript to clone it

For its freshly released browser, Internet Explorer, Microsoft pulled out all the stops to try to compete with Netscape, the market leader. For the release of Internet Explorer version 3, Microsoft did everything it could to try to integrate Javascript into its browser.

In August 1996, "JScript" was unveiled, a copy of Javascript, entirely created from reverse-engineering the latter and whose name differs only due to Microsoft's desire to avoid any risk of a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems, the publisher of Java.

#3 - AJAX did not exist when Javascript launched

We often think that Microsoft has always been behind in browser development compared to its competitors, especially since the arrival of Google Chrome.

But in the history of Javascript, it's actually the opposite: Microsoft was a driving force for innovation in the language, and the implementation of new features often first appeared in the JScript version, before being copied by others and then standardized.

This was notably the case for AJAX, a concept developed by the team working on the web version of Outlook at Microsoft, whose simple diagram below started building excitement and laying the foundation for the future of the modern web applications we know today.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

The feature first appeared in version 5.0 of Internet Explorer in 1999 before being standardized in 2006 by the W3C.

#4 - jQuery is still one of the most used libraries in 2020

While we tend to think of jQuery as one of the web's "dinosaurs", this library, which was one of Javascript's spearheads, is still used on millions of sites.

According to statistics from W3Techs.com, jQuery was present on 77% of websites in 2022.

One of the explanations behind the enthusiasm for jQuery was precisely the issue of non-standardization among web browsers at the time, particularly regarding the DOM API.

jQuery thus allowed all developers to build the interactions of their web applications based on a common platform, standardizing browser APIs.

#5 - There is a comic book about Google's V8 engine

On September 2, 2008, Google officially launched the first version of its browser: Google Chrome. This launch was also the opportunity to reveal two open-source initiatives: Chromium and the next-generation Javascript interpretation engine, V8.

For the occasion, Google even released a (digital) comic book to explain, in a fun and graphic way, how these new tools worked overall.

Link to the comic: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

It is also interesting to note that in this comic, Google's teams emphasize the fact that the V8 engine is independent of the browser, and that developers are invited to use it for other projects.

And indeed, it was in 2009 that Ryan Dahl presented his project called "NodeJS", a Javascript server-side runtime environment based on the V8 engine.

To learn more about NodeJS, I invite you to read my article titled "No, NodeJS is not a language".

#6 - Javascript, the most popular language on Github since 2013

While Javascript remains a divisive language, it remains the only programming language interpreted by the browser, and the growing importance the web takes on in our lives makes Javascript more or less indispensable.

Furthermore, projects like Electron or React-Native, which allow the creation of desktop software or mobile applications, make it possible to reuse Javascript skills to reach new platforms.

If you want to discover Electron or React-Native, I invite you to read the articles I've dedicated to them on my blog.

#7 - Javascript is present in space

A few years ago, the software engineers at SpaceX held a Q&A session on the Reddit platform, and the following sentence sent shivers through the Javascript community:

"The use of Chromium and Javascript in mission critical environments is a popular question. In order for me to answer this question clearly, we have to understand that chromium in this context is used as a UI rendering engine only. [...]"

According to SpaceX information, the graphical interfaces of the Dragon 2 capsule's screens for astronauts are therefore designed with Chromium and Javascript and are intensively tested.

Engineers are also trained to write C++ in order to maintain the same mindset for writing the most robust code possible, even in Javascript.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and see you soon on the blog!