JavaScript: the first 20 years

by Brendan Eich, Allen Wirfs-Brock

How a sidekick scripting language for Java, created at Netscape in a ten-day hack, ships first as a de facto Web standard and eventually becomes the world's most widely used programming language. This paper [at 190 pages, long enough to be a book] tells the story of the creation, design, evolution, and standardization of the JavaScript language over the period of 1995-2015. But the story is not only about the technical details of the language. It is also the story of how people and organizations competed and collaborated to shape the JavaScript language which dominates the Web of 2020.

190 pages, ebook

Published June 12, 2020

Reviews

[Andrew Montalenti · Rating 5 out of 5]

For programming language and open web geeks, this 190-page history of JavaScript is a real treat. It traces the origins, motivations, and evolution of the JavaScript language, from its humble creation by Brendan Eich in 1995 to its eventual standards-body-based improvements as "ECMAScript" or "ES", concluding with the "ES6" or "ES2015" standard, which landed in 2015, and which is what today's programmers think of as "modern JavaScript". Here, you'll learn how the web, and its most popular language, evolved, including the backroom discussions of the key engineers who debated the merits of key programming language features, as well as the politics of their own corporations, and weighed those changes against the pragmatic constraints of browser engine developers and existing legacy code on the wider web.