Birth
Born in 1995
JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich while he was an engineer at Netscape. JavaScript was first released with the Netscape Navigator 2 browser in early 1996.
1st edition (ES1) in 1997
It was originally called LiveScript. But at this time, another language was popular - Java. And marketers decided to name the new language - JavaScript. To increase sales. Despite the fact that these two languages have very little in common. This was the source of the confusion.
A few month later, Microsoft released Jscript with Internet Explorer 3. Netscape sent JavaScript to ECMA International (European Standards Organization). And 1st Edition (ES1) of JavaScript was released in June 1997.
All editions www.ecma-international.org
ES1 is also known as ECMAScript 1 and ECMAScript 1997.
Editions
- ES1 (1997) first edition
- ES3 (1999) with significant updates - stable edition
- ES4 was dropped due to political differences of language complexity
- ES5 (2009) with many part of ES4
- ES6 (2015) major edition of the standard
Input/Output
Unlike most programming languages, JavaScript has no concept of input or output. It is designed as a scripting language in the host environment, and it is the host environment that must provide mechanisms for communicating with the outside world.
Browser and more
Browser is the most common host environment. But not only.
JavaScript interpreters can be found in:
- Adobe Acrobat
- Adobe Photoshop
- SVG images
- server-side environments as Node.js
- NoSQL databases as open source Apache CouchDB
- embedded computers
- complete desktop environments like GNOME (GUI for GNU/Linux)
- Yahoo's widget engine
- and others