Thirty years ago today, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release announcing JavaScript, an object scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. The language emerged from a frantic 10-day sprint at pioneering browser company Netscape, where engineer Brendan Eich hacked together a working internal prototype during May 1995.
While the JavaScript language didn’t ship publicly until that September and didn’t reach a 1.0 release until March 1996, the descendants of Eich’s initial 10-day hack now run on approximately 98.9 percent of all websites with client-side code, making JavaScript the dominant programming language of the web. It’s wildly popular; beyond the browser, JavaScript powers server backends, mobile apps, desktop software, and even some embedded systems. According to several surveys, JavaScript consistently ranks among the most widely used programming languages in the world. //
The JavaScript partnership secured endorsements from 28 major tech companies, but amusingly, the December 1995 announcement now reads like a tech industry epitaph. The endorsing companies included Digital Equipment Corporation (absorbed by Compaq, then HP), Silicon Graphics (bankrupt), and Netscape itself (bought by AOL, dismantled). Sun Microsystems, co-creator of JavaScript and owner of Java, was acquired by Oracle in 2010. JavaScript outlived them all. //
Confusion about its relationship to Java continues: The two languages share a name, some syntax conventions, and virtually nothing else. Java was developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems using static typing and class-based objects. JavaScript uses dynamic typing and prototype-based inheritance. The distinction between the two languages, as one Stack Overflow user put it in 2010, is similar to the relationship between the words “car” and “carpet.” //
The language now powers not just websites but mobile applications through frameworks like React Native, desktop software through Electron, and server infrastructure through Node.js. Somewhere around 2 million to 3 million packages exist on npm, the JavaScript package registry.
