Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

JavaScript as a tool

What is JavaScript? If you consider popularity indices, such as the ones at www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ or http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html, you'll find that JavaScript is consistently in the top ten most popular languages. From a more academic point of view, the language is sort of a mixture, borrowing features from several different languages. Several libraries helped the growth of the language by providing features that weren't so easily available, such as classes and inheritance (today's version of the language does support classes, but that was not the case not too long ago), that otherwise had to be achieved by doing some prototype tricks.

The name JavaScript was chosen to take advantage of the popularity of Java—just ...