History of JavaScript

The beginnings

JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich in 1995 during his stint at Netscape communications. As the name suggests, it was mostly inspired by Java,  and a couple of lesser known languages named Scheme and Self.

Netscape used to be the go-to internet browser in the mid-to-late '90s. They enjoyed the market dominance for quite a while.

Netscape Market share over the years

Throughout these years, Microsoft was emerging as a tech giant and it was evident that Netscape will soon be under threat form the Microsoft' attempts of making their own web browser. Internet Explorer was solely created for the Windows platform to remain as independent as possible from Netscape.

However, Microsoft managed to be a bigger foe than anticipated for Netscape and this prompted them to standardize most of their innovations to prevent Microsoft from gaining control over their precious but still very young JavaScript language. They also decided to partner with Sun Corp. on their common interest of breaking Microsoft's market monopoly.

This partnership meant that sun had a lot competitive browser and delivery system information for their upcoming technologies such as Java which they were developing since 1990. Netscape on the other hand, found an ally to fight against the might Microsoft. They also managed to be the official browser for the hotly anticipated Java platform.

Usage of JavaScript

Brendan Eich's strategy was to ride the hype wave of java and advertise JavaScript as its main companion language. JavaScript enabled isomorphic development with java as they were able to run on client and server side both. However, JavaScript at the time was very limited and could not even draw pixels. this lead Sun to view JavaScript more as a helper than a rival. 

So JavaScript was born first as a companion for java for the web. However, it was still looked down for a several traits that became a part of JavaScript due to its speedy development cycle. These were;

• Automatic semicolon insertion.
• Automatic type coercion when using common operators. 
• Lack of block scopes.
• Lack of classes
• Difficulty to modularise.  

However most of the criticism was form developers who were used to other languages. These were addressed gradually through the versions of JavaScript. 

JavaScript has a rich history of ups and downs. However, it has grown to be one of the most widely used programming languages in the web and around the physical world alike. It has become so important that JavaScript is now one of the defining standards of the WWW.