Brendan Eich
JavaScript, not to be confused with Java, was created in 10 days in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, then working at Netscape and now of Mozilla.
JavaScript was not always known as JavaScript: the original name was Mocha, a name chosen by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape.
When the World
Wide Web was first created in the early 1990s all web pages were static.
When you viewed a web page you saw exactly what the page was set up to show
you and there was no way for you to interact with the page.
Being able to
interact with a web page - have it do something in response to your actions
- required the addition of some form of programming language to "instruct"
the page how it should respond to your actions. In order to have it respond
immediately without having to reload the web page this language needed to be
able to run on the same computer as the browser displaying the page.
At the time
there were two browsers that were reasonably popular - Netscape Navigator
and Internet Explorer. Netscape was the first to bring out a programming
language that would allow web pages to become interactive - they called it
Livescript and it was integrated into the browser (meaning that the
browser would interpret the commands directly without requiring the code to
be compiled and without requiring a plugin to be able to run it). This meant
that anyone using the latest Netscape browser would be able to interact with
pages that made use of this language.
Another
programming language called Java (which required a separate plugin in order
to run) became very well known and so Netscape decided to try to cash in on
this by renaming the language built into their browser to
Javascript. Note that while some Java and Javascript code may
appear similar, they are in fact two entirely different languages that serve
completely different purposes.
Not to be left
behind Internet Explorer was soon updated to support not one but two
integrated languages. One was called
vbscript and was based on the BASIC programming language and the
other was called Jscript and
was 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 the 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.
The importance of this scripting language was too
great to leave its future development in the hands of the competing browser
developers and so in 1996 Javascript was handed over to an international
standards body called ECMA who then became responsible for the subsequent
development of the language. As a result of this the language was officially
renamed ECMAScript or
ECMA-262 but most people
still refer to it as Javascript.