Gather round, kids. Professor Semicolon is going to tell you a story.
It's 1995. The internet is new and exciting. People are using a web browser called Netscape Navigator to look at web pages that are basically just text and pictures. Static. Boring. Like reading a newspaper on a screen.
The folks at Netscape wanted web pages to come alive. They wanted a simple programming language that could run inside the browser and make pages interactive.
So they hired a programmer named Brendan Eck and asked him to create one.
And he did. In about ten days.
Yes. Ten days. Some people take longer than that to choose a phone case.
The language was first called Mocha. Then it was renamed LiveScript. And then, because another programming language called Java was extremely popular and trendy at the time, the marketing team decided to rename it JavaScript, hoping some of Java's cool factor would rub off.
Which brings us to the most important fact in this entire chapter:
JavaScript is NOT Java.
They're completely different languages that just happen to share part of a name. As programmers like to say:
"Java is to JavaScript as car is to carpet."
Or "ham is to hamster." Or "pain is to painting." You get the point.
Because JavaScript was built so quickly, it ended up with a few... quirks. Some features behave in ways that seem strange or surprising. We'll point these out as we go (usually with a Buggsy Alert), so you won't get caught off guard. Every language has quirks. JavaScript just has some famous ones.
The rest of the story, in fast-forward
- 1997: JavaScript gets an official standard called ECMAScript (named after Ecma International, the organization that maintains it). This means all browsers agree on how JavaScript should work. Mostly.
- 2000s: Websites like Gmail and Google Maps show the world that JavaScript can build real applications in the browser, not just little pop-ups.
- 2009: A programmer named Ryan Dahl creates Node.js, which lets JavaScript run outside the browser, on servers and regular computers. Suddenly JavaScript is everywhere.
- 2015: A huge update called ES6 (also known as ES2015) adds tons of modern features:
let,const, arrow functions, classes, and much more. It's like JavaScript went to the gym. - Today: A new version of JavaScript comes out every year with fresh features, and it's one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.
"ES" stands for ECMAScript, the official name of the standard. JavaScript is the most famous implementation of that standard. So when people say "ES6 features" or "ES2015 features," they mean "the stuff that was added to JavaScript in the 2015 update." Since then, versions are named by year: ES2016, ES2017, and so on. Everything in this book is modern JavaScript that works in any up-to-date browser.