History

1995: Beginnings

• 04/1995 - Created by Brendan Eich in 10 days
• Original goal - to put Scheme 'in the browser'
• Developed under the name Mocha, but officially called LiveScript when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995
• Renamed JavaScript when it was deployed in the Netscape Navigator 2.0 beta 3 in December.
• This caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language
• Characterized as a marketing ploy by Netscape since Java was the hot new Web programming language.

1996-99: A Star is Born

• 11/96 - Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International
• 06/97 - ECMAScript published in the first edition of the ECMA-262 standard
• 06/98 - ECMAScript 2
• 12/99 - ECMAScript 3

2000-04: The Silent Years

• Attempts to create and implement ECMAScript 4
• ECMAScript 4 is a huge change from previous versions (included a lot of what is in ECMAScript 2015 and more)
• Microsoft wasn't interested in collaborating in the standardization process
• Other companies disagree on the direction the language should take
• Work on version 4 was halted

2005-07: Consolidation

• Similar technologies like ActionScript took ideas from ECMAScript 4 and developed them, later feeding back into later ECMAScript versions
• Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and other 4th edition dissenters formed their own subcommittee to design a less ambitious update of ECMAScript 3 (ECMAScript 3.1

2008-11: Progress

• 07/2008 - Brendan Eich announces TC39 would focus on v 3.1 which is later renamed to v 5
• 12/2009 - ECMAScript 5 is published
• 06/2011 - ECMAScript 5.1 is published (international standards alignment - no new features)

2012-2015: Harmony

• From 2009-15 TC39 committee works collaboratively again to create ECMAScript 6 "Harmony" :)
• 06/2016 - ECMAScript 6 is published and renamed to ECMAScript 2015 to align with the TC39 committee's desire to no longer release large updates infrequently but instead release small updates on a yearly basis
• ECMAScript 6 includes some features from the failed ECMAScript 4
  https://babeljs.io/docs/learn-es2015/

2016-Present: The Future

• ECMAScript 2015 is still being implemented in browsers - none have full support (as of 2016/07/19)
  https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
• 06/2016 - ECMAScript 2016 is published
• Includes only 2 new features
  http://www.2ality.com/2016/01/ecmascript-2016.html
  • Array.prototype.includes
    ['1', '2'].includes('1') === true
  • Exponentiation operator
    3 ** 2 === 9
• Work is now being done on ECMAScript 2017
  • Uses proposal tier system (0-4)
    https://github.com/tc39/ecma262

What is it?!

What does Wikipedia say?

• "JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, and interpreted programming language" - Wikipedia
• Javascript is typed, but it's loosely typed or dynamically typed, not untyped
  See: typeof (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/typeof)
• Modern Javascript is compiled (possibly JIT) and then interpreted

It's a bird, a plane and superman

• Imperative & structured
• Function scoping (not block)
• Dynamic typing
• Prototypical inheritance (OO) and object based
• Functional (first class functions)
• Infinite function parameters
• Object and array literals
• Borrowed from several programming languages: Java (syntax, primitive values versus objects), Scheme and AWK (first-class functions), Self (prototypal inheritance), and Perl and Python (strings, arrays, and regular expressions).

Common Confusionings

• Execution context vs function scope
  http://ryanmorr.com/understanding-scope-and-context-in-javascript/
• Most implementations are tied to the DOM, except the ones that aren't (NodeJS)
• Bullet Three

Related 'languages'

• Typescript
• Coffeescript
• Actionscript
• Dart
• Elm
• Experimental features through transpilers (ex Decorators)