JavaScript: Difference between revisions

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In 1993, the [[National Center for Supercomputing Applications]] (NCSA), a unit of the [[University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign|University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]], released [[Mosaic (web browser)|NCSA Mosaic]], the first popular graphical [[Web browser]], which played an important part in expanding the growth of the nascent [[World Wide Web]]. In 1994, a company called [[Netscape|Mosaic Communications]] was founded in [[Mountain View, California]] and employed many of the original NCSA Mosaic authors to create [[Netscape Navigator|Mosaic Netscape]]. However, it intentionally shared no code with NCSA Mosaic. The internal codename for the company's browser was Mozilla, which stood for "Mosaic killer", as the company's goal was to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser. The first version of the Web browser, Mosaic Netscape 0.9, was released in late 1994. Within four months it had already taken three-quarters of the browser market and became the main browser for the Internet in the 1990s. To avoid trademark ownership problems with the NCSA, the browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator in the same year, and the company took the name Netscape Communications. Netscape Communications realized that the Web needed to become more dynamic. [[Marc Andreessen]], the founder of the company believed that [[HTML]] needed a "glue language" that was easy to use by Web designers and part-time programmers to assemble components such as images and plugins, where the code could be written directly in the Web page markup.

In 1995, Netscape Communications recruited [[Brendan Eich]] with the goal of embedding the [[Scheme (programming language)|Scheme]] programming language into its Netscape Navigator.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch04.html|title=Chapter 4. How JavaScript Was Created}}</ref> Before he could get started, Netscape Communications collaborated with [[Sun Microsystems]] to include in Netscape Navigator Sun's more static programming language [[Java (programming language)|Java]] (which was named after the coffe bean), in order to compete with [[Microsoft Outlook|Microsoft]] for user adoption of Web technologies and platforms.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Severance | first=Charles | date=February 2012 | title=JavaScript: Designing a Language in 10 Days | journal=Computer | volume=45 | issue=2 | pages=7–8 | publisher=IEEE Computer Society | url=http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/2012/02/mco2012020007-abs.html | accessdate=23 March 2013 | doi=10.1109/MC.2012.57 }}</ref> Netscape Communications then decided that the scripting language they wanted to create would complement Java and should have a similar syntax, which excluded adopting other languages such as [[Perl]], [[Python (programming language)|Python]], [[Tcl|TCL]], or Scheme. To defend the idea of JavaScript against competing proposals, the company needed a prototype. Eich wrote one in 10 days, in May 1995.

Although it was developed under the name '''Mocha''', the language was officially called '''LiveScript''' when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995, but it was renamed '''JavaScript'''<ref name="press_release" /> when it was deployed in the Netscape Navigator 2.0 beta 3 in December.<ref name="techvision">{{cite web | archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20080208124612/http://wp.netscape.com/comprod/columns/techvision/innovators_be.html | archivedate=2008-02-08 | title=TechVision: Innovators of the Net: Brendan Eich and JavaScript | publisher=web.archive.org | url=http://wp.netscape.com/comprod/columns/techvision/innovators_be.html }}</ref> The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language, and the choice has been characterized<ref>{{Citation|last=Fin JS|title=Brendan Eich - CEO of Brave|date=2016-06-17|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmhtfTrRxc&feature=youtu.be&t=2m5s|accessdate=2018-02-07}}</ref> as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new Web programming language.