JavaScript is celebrating its 25th anniversary

By admin On Dec 4, 2020

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Dec. 4, 25 years has passed since Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems announced JavaScript. The scripting language is still very popular, with both websites and programmers.

Netscape and Sun cited as benefits of JavaScript when announcing on December 4, 1995, that the scripting language was open and cross-platform and that it was complementary to and integrated with both HTML and Java. The parties wanted to make it a standard without licensing costs and submitted proposals to this end to the W3 Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

In 1997, JavaScript was given standard status by the European Computer Manufacturers Association as ECMAScript, which has since set the specification for interoperability. The W3C considers JavaScript as one of the three pillars for the web standard, along with HTML and CSS.

Brendan Eich

The primary designer of JavaScript and ECMAScript is Brendan Eich, who also started Mozilla and is currently CEO of the company behind the Brave browser. The languages got some derivatives such as JScript from Microsoft, which did not want to use the JavaScript name for its implementation for Internet Explorer, and ActionScript from Macromedia, which integrated it into its Flash software for web applications. In 2012, Microsoft also announced TypeScript, with extensions for developing more comprehensive programs.

JavaScript is still extremely popular. Not only is the scripting language ubiquitous on the web and in many applications, but it has continued to be popular with developers. For example, on GitHub and Stackoverflow it has been the most used language for years, although in Stackoverflow it has been overtaken by Rust, TypeScript and Python among others.