Practical Modern JavaScript

Chapter 1. ECMAScript and the Future of JavaScript

JavaScript has gone from being a 1995 marketing ploy to gain a tactical advantage to becoming the core programming experience in the world’s most widely used application runtime platform in 2017. The language doesn’t merely run in browsers anymore, but is also used to create desktop and mobile applications, in hardware devices, and even in space suit design at NASA.

How did JavaScript get here, and where is it going next?

1.1 A Brief History of JavaScript Standards

Back in 1995, Netscape envisioned a dynamic web beyond what HTML could offer. Brendan Eich was initially brought into Netscape to develop a language that was functionally akin to Scheme, but for the browser. Once he joined, he learned that upper management wanted it to look like Java, and a deal to that effect was already underway.

Brendan created the first JavaScript prototype in 10 days, taking Scheme’s first-class functions and Self’s prototypes as its main ingredients. The initial version of JavaScript was code-named Mocha. It didn’t have array or object literals, and every error resulted in an alert. The lack of exception handling is why, to this day, many operations result in NaN or undefined. Brendan’s work on DOM level 0 and the first edition of JavaScript set the stage for standards work.

This revision of JavaScript was marketed as LiveScript when it started shipping with a beta release of Netscape Navigator 2.0, in September 1995. It was rebranded as JavaScript ...