NE #34: JavaScript was developed within 10 days
JavaScript is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world and is of great importance for the function and popularity of the . While HTML enables the static representation of content in the browser, these contents can be dynamically displayed and modified thanks to JavaScript. JavaScript has developed impressively in recent decades, starting as a script language within the browser to the basis for a powerful web server architecture.
There are numerous application areas, be it as a language within the MongoDB database system, for the development of games and applications, or as a server-side application [THEN1].
JavaScript is extremely successful, versatile and popular. And it all started with a small language that was developed within 10 days!
When the web was still very young, pages were displayed with HTML. HTML was relatively simple and so you didn’t have to be a big programmer: to skill your own content on the stage of the web. This simplicity was an important success factor for the early World Weide Web.
Thanks to the platform-independent browser, web developers were able to make their programs easily available for different operating systems. What was missing was the ability to interact with the content. Netscape saw the problem and insected Brendan Eich in 1995 with an important task to develop a solution in the form of a corresponding programming language.
“But Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Bill Joy of Sun, and myself [Brendan Eich] and a few others saw that there was a need for a language was was was a need for a language was that you should could put directly in the web page,”
Brendan Eich, InfoWorld, 2011
At first it was said that the programming language could serve as a basis. Then Java was considered and Netscape negotiated with Sun Microsystems to support Java in the in-house browser. But Java (then still called Oak) was large and complex. Should web development continue to be accessible, Java was not the best choice. It had a simple solution, similar to Microsoft’s VisualBasic, which was considered an entry-level alternative for C or C++.
And so it was that in May 1995, Eich developed a first functional prototype of JavaScript within 10 days, since it was still under the name Mocha. Mocha was introduced with the Netscape Navigator 2.0. In September 1995, the name was changed to LiveScript — Live sounded more dynamic from a marketing view. In addition, Eich had used the time to clean up a large part of the code; ten days are expected to be very scarce to obtain a certain code quality.
In December 1995, the name JavaScript was introduced to underline the meaning as a simple alternative to Java and certainly also to benefit a little of Java’s popularity. Internally, the JavaScript engine is still referred to as SpiderMonkey.
The big competitor in the browser market, Microsoft, did not wait long. In August 1996, they moved and implemented their own JavaScript engine in Internet Explorer: JScript. However, since then it was not held so much of standards, JScript was only limited compatible with SpiderMonkey. Only one consequence of the browser war, which in the following years was to many web developers: women headaches and sleepless nights.
