History of JavaScript
The unlikely story of the web's language
JavaScript was created in 10 days in May 1995 by Brendan Eich while he was working at Netscape.
The Timeline
- 1995: "Mocha" (later LiveScript, then JavaScript) is released.
- 1997: The first edition of the ECMAScript standard is published (ECMAScript 1).
- 2009: Node.js is released by Ryan Dahl, bringing JS to the server.
- 2015: The release of ES6 (ES2015)—the biggest update to JS, adding classes, arrow functions, and more.
- Every Year Since: A new version of ECMAScript is released with incremental improvements.
JavaScript is NOT Java
The name "JavaScript" was a marketing tactic by Netscape to capitalize on the popularity of the Java programming language at the time. They share almost nothing in common except some C-style syntax.
Next Step: Learn What is JavaScript today.