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A Short History of JavaScript and Its Evolution
How JavaScript evolved to be what it is today.
Today, JavaScript is used everywhere. Everything from front-end websites to web servers to games use JavaScript for running their logic. But not everyone knows how it started, and how much it has changed since its beginning. Or how certain tools and libraries changed the path of its evolution.
The beginning of LiveScript
It is 1995. Brendan Eich, who would later found the Mozilla Corporation, was working with Netscape and Sun Microsystems to create a radical new scripting language to make the web dynamic, complement Java “applets”, and increase the capabilities of websites. They named this language LiveScript when they released it in Netscape Navigator 2, and it was renamed to JavaScript three months later.
The release of JavaScript also included an implementation for Netscape LiveWire, Netscape’s web server, which allowed JavaScript and Java to be run on the server to render web pages. This was the first release of server-side JavaScript and predated Node.js by 13 years.
