The History of JavaScript

JavaScript has one of the most famously rushed origin stories in programming. In 1995, a Netscape engineer named Brendan Eich was asked to design a scripting language for the Netscape Navigator browser — and he built the very first version of it in just 10 days.

Roughly how long did it take Brendan Eich to create the first version of JavaScript?

The name "JavaScript" is actually a bit of a marketing move — the language has almost nothing to do with Java. Java was extremely popular at the time, so Netscape chose a similar-sounding name to ride that popularity, even though the two languages have very different designs.

JavaScript was named partly to ride the popularity of the ____ programming language, despite the two being very different under the hood.

For years, every browser maker implemented JavaScript slightly differently, which was a nightmare for developers. That changed once the language was standardized under the name ECMAScript, with browser vendors gradually converging on the same rules. Since 2015, a new ECMAScript version has been released every year, each adding features to the language.

In 2009, Node.js changed everything again: it let JavaScript run outside the browser for the first time, on servers and in command-line tools, using the same V8 engine that powers Chrome. That single project is a big part of why JavaScript is now used for so much more than just websites.

JavaScript and Java are essentially the same language under different names.