May 23, 1995; 21 years ago, the first version released and now the most commonly used programming language on earth according to the stack overflow 2016 developer survey. Javascript or related frameworks has won majority of categories and this trend was continuing for some years. Below given some of the categories in which Javascript has won.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016
Lets start a journey to understand the 21 years which made Javascript the top one. Many things happened in web world along with it. Will try to touch some of them which are closely related along with.
1995: born at Netscape
In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), released NCSA Mosaic, the first popular graphical Web browser, which played an important part in expanding the growth of the World Wide Web.
In 1994, a company called Mosaic Communications was founded in Mountain View, California and employed many of the original NCSA Mosaic authors to create Mosaic Netscape. The internal codename for the company’s browser was Mozilla, which stood for “Mosaic killer”, as the company’s goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world’s number one web browser. The first version of the Web browser, Mosaic Netscape 0.9, was released in late 1994. Within four months it had already taken three-quarters of the browser market and became the main browser for Internet in the 1990s. To avoid trademark ownership problems with the NCSA, the browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator in the same year, and the company took the name Netscape Communications.
Netscape Communications realised that the Web needed to become more dynamic. Marc Andreessen, the founder of the company believed that HTML needed a “glue language” that was easy to use by Web designers and part-time programmers to assemble components such as images and plugins, where the code could be written directly in the Web page markup. In 1995, the company recruited Brendan Eich with the goal of embedding the Scheme programming language into its Netscape Navigator.
Before he could get started, Netscape Communications collaborated with Sun Microsystems to include in Netscape Navigator Sun’s more static programming language Java, in order to compete with Microsoft for user adoption of Web technologies and platforms. Netscape Communications then decided that the scripting language they wanted to create would complement Java and should have a similar syntax, which excluded adopting other languages such as Perl, Python, TCL, or Scheme. To defend the idea of JavaScript against competing proposals, the company needed a prototype. Eich wrote one in 10 days, in May 1995.
Although it was developed under the name Mocha, the language was officially called LiveScript when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995, but it was renamed JavaScript when it was deployed in the Netscape Navigator 2.0 beta 3 in December.
The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language, and the choice has been characterised as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new Web programming language.
Internet Explorer was soon updated to support not one but two integrated languages. One was called vbscript, based on the BASIC programming language and the other was called Jscript, very similar to Javascript. In fact if you were very careful what commands you used you could write code that would be able to be processed as Javascript by Netscape Navigator and as Jscript by Internet Explorer.
At that time Netscape Navigator was by far the more popular browser and so later versions of Internet Explorer implemented versions of Jscript that were more and more like Javascript. By the time that Internet Explorer became the dominant browser Javascript had become the accepted standard for writing interactive processing to be run in the web browser.
Also,
- The concept of IPv6 was proposed in 1995
- AltaVista, one of the earliest web search engine established in 1995. Before that Yahoo(1994) and Lycos(1993) were the popular ones.
- Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0(Layout Engine : Spyglass) in August 1995
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 2(Layout Engine : Spyglass) was released for Windows 95, Windows NT 3.51, and NT 4.0 on 22 November 1995. It had support for JavaScript, SSL, cookies, frames, VRML, RSA, and Internet newsgroups.
- Netscape was the first browser to support Javascript, animated gifs and HTML frames
- The first official standard for HTML (HTML 2.0) came out in 1995
References
