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You have completed The Landscape of JavaScript!
You have completed The Landscape of JavaScript!
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JavaScript has evolved into a powerful, robust programming language. In this video, you'll more about how the JavaScript language and its standards evolved into their current state.
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JavaScript has evolved into a powerful
robust programming language over
0:00
the years.
0:03
Earlier I briefly covered the history of
JavaScript, in this video I'll talk about
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how the JavaScript language and its
standard evolved to their current state.
0:09
When JavaScript was officially
released in Netscape Navigator,
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it became in instant game
changer in web user experience.
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So competing browsers couldn't help but
to take notice and
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come up with their own
version of JavaScript.
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Microsoft in particular wanted
a scripting language for their browser,
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Internet Explorer.
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So they've created their own
implementation of JavaScript.
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They named their version, JScript,
since the name JavaScript was trademarked.
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The differences between JavaScript and
JScript, made it difficult for
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designers and developers to make
a website work well in multiple browsers.
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A site that worked in Netscape would not
work at all in Internet Explorer and
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vice versa.
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So developing a site that
worked in both in Netscape and
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IE became extremely tedious,
time consuming and expensive.
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Because of this, JavaScript
started getting a reputation for
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being a road block to
moving the web forward.
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At the time JavaScript wasn't
standardized, there were no rules and
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guidelines established for
implementing JavaScript in browsers.
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So in 1996 Netscape decided
to standardized JavaScript.
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They submitted JavaScript to the standards
organization ECMA international for
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a consideration as an industry standard.
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ECMAScript became the official name used
to refer to versions of the language.
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The language was standardized under a
technical committee at ECMA known as TC39.
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ECMAScript would open up JavaScript to
a wider audience while keeping other
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implementations like Microsoft's JScript
consistent across browsers and
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giving other implementors a voice
in the evolution of the language.
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The first edition of ECMAScript
was released in 1997.
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ECMAScript 2 and
3 were standardized soon after,
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introducing more features to the language.
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But the process of evolving and growing
JavaScript become a bit challenging and
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difficult after that.
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When it came time to work on
ECMAScript 4 the TC39 committee could not
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agree on its feature set.
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By 2003, because of major differences,
concerning language complexity,
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and on how JavaScript was to move forward,
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work by the committee had stopped,
TC39 broke up, and the spec was abandoned.
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Many of the proposed features
were completely dropped.
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So for years, there were no major changes
to the language and no real push for
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a new release of the ECMAScript standard.
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But in late 2008 the TC39 committee
harmoniously regrouped to
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work on ECMAScript 3.1,
which was later renamed to ECMAScript 5.
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And ES 5 introduced a number of features
to the language which including support
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for JSON, Getters and Setters and objects,
and new array methods like Filter,
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forEach, and map.
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ES 5 is a version of JavaScript that is
fully supported in all modern browsers
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today.
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Although ECMAScript 4 was abandoned, some
of its features eventually made their way
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into the sixth edition of JavaScript,
ES 6.
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ES 6 was in the works for several years,
it was the largest upgrade to
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the language and a big milestone
in the history of JavaScript.
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When ES 6 was finalized in June 2015,
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it officially became known as
ECMAScript 2015 or ES 2015.
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Today, the ECMA TC39 committee
is still responsible for
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authoring a spec and evolving
the programming language by deciding what
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features get added to the language.
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The TC39 Committee is made up of delegates
from different companies including
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major browser vendors and big names
like Netflix, Facebook, and PayPal.
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The delegates are responsible for
creating, approving, or
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denying language proposals.
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Did you know that there's also different
varieties or flavors of JavaScript?
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You'll get a sampling of the common
JavaScript flavors in the next video.
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That way you'll know which one might
work best for you and your team.
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