Hey devs, if you got here without reading this first, please do. Understanding the reason behind why something is done is quite important — understanding the why exposes us to understand the proper use cases. This is a storytime post, what a bummer right? But trust me we will get to code soon, and I promise to keep this as interesting as possible, I mean the story speaks for itself. So, without further ado — Javascript.
Life before Javascript.
It is important to note that websites did use to exist pre-Javascript era. I’m sure that is quite obvious to most of us. HTML and CSS were the power tools that were used to build websites, but those websites were information only and had no user interaction whatsoever. When Netscape Navigator, a web browser at the time wanted the users to be able to interact with websites. Brendan Eich, a Netscape employee at the time, was working on bringing functionality to websites. Netscape had a deal with Sun Microsystems, to build a Java-like language to bring functionality to websites. And thus, in 1995, LiveScript was born ( later changed to Javascript ) which represented a Java-like syntax. Brendan Eich developed Javascript in 10 days. Yes, you heard me right! 10 days. This new way to interact with websites was groundbreaking as it opened doors to a lot of opportunities. But, the Javascript you and I know now is very different from what it was created for — The Browser. You can learn more about the JS history here.
ES for Javascript.
I’m sure after the first time you typed Javascript on Google to learn it, you would’ve seen ES5 and ES6. ES is short for ECMAScript which was a language for the standardized specification of Javascript. Flew right over your head dint it? Don't you worry, it happened to me too. You can think of ECMAScript as something that was created to standardize the syntax for JS and make it more readable (let's say). ES5 and ES6 are, you guessed it, versions of ES. Obviously, there were more versions before, but I will trust your curiosity to work on that. ES5 and ES6 are the most commonly used Javascript specifications right now. Although ES6 is not the latest specification, there is also — ES2022. Keeping up with the Javascripts can definitely prove fruitful as they’re made to make your life easier. Specifics of what each does isn't that hard to discover but it would prove counterproductive before diving into core Javascript code.
Ryan Dahl, the reason why you see Javascript everywhere.
At the time when PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Java were the predominantly used backend languages. Javascript did not have the capability of being run on the server as it did not have an environment to run in. In 2009, Ryan Dahl, wrote NodeJS which used Google Chrome’s V8 engine. NodeJS we use today is only possible because of the V8 engine. However, V8 is not the only Javascript engine. SpiderMonkey is the Javascript engine used by Firefox, and Javascript core is Safari’s engine, Internet Explorer provides an engine known as Chakra. In fact, SpiderMonkey is the first javascript engine. Now I know what you might be thinking, why V8 then? Well, the answer is very simple and quite complex. V8 converts Javascript to machine understandable code, while the other engines convert JS to byte-code. This difference gave Ryan the idea to develop a JS runtime for the server. But it wasn't as widely received as you might think and Ryan faced a lot of criticism from the community. Even from Google. Sometime along the way, NPM(Node Package Manager) was created, which allowed Javascript developers to share packaged modules of code. This definitely bought NodeJS back into the spotlight and the community started taking it more seriously as this meant that writing more Javascript would make NodeJS more developer friendly and more developers wrote and shared their modules to be used in NodeJS. This was one of NodeJS’s biggest reasons for success and growth. You can read more about NPM and Nodejs here.
Javascript over the years.
It has been 27 years since JS was released and 13 years since NodeJS. An already popular and extremely important browser language was boosted in usage and popularity by Ryan Dahl through NodeJS. Javascript has been a language that sees continuous and groundbreaking innovations in terms of frameworks, libraries, and specifications and I am sure It will continue to do so.
According to StackOverflow JS is the most widely used language in the world
Newer JS runtimes like Deno and Bun have come to the spotlight, and there definitely seems to be a lot more development to be seen. So if you’re just getting into the world of JS, there's never a wrong time.
Conclusion
There’s definitely a lot more to it than covered here, but I will leave that to your curiosity to scour the internet. Over the next few articles of this series, I will be getting into fundamental JS concepts and code implementations so make sure to keep your laptop or a notebook ready to consume the information in the best way possible. The reason I stress learning the origins of JS or any language for that matter is that it allows you to understand the problem that it tried to solve, which becomes extremely useful in the long run when you are about to introduce the next big contribution to JS. I mean sure if your intention is to simply build websites that use JS, feel free to skip this. But, if you’re like me and you want to feed your curiosity about the whys then make it a point to understand the reason behind why anything(frameworks, libraries, etc.) was created, doing so exposes you to the problem that was solved and may urge you to look for more solutions to more problems that are unsolved. Brendan Eich solved the problem of web interaction with JS, Ryan Dahl is the reason you and I call, or will call, ourselves, Full Stack Engineers. Because he introduced the possibility of having to use JS on the server side and client side. He too always questioned the reason behind why things were created in programming and then how. Sit tight and code, until next time devs.
