An Introduction to JavaScript
The evolution of JavaScript from 1995 - till date.
What is JavaScript?
JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich.
One of the most popular and widely used programming languages in the world as per the Stack Overflow survey 2022.
It growing/booming more than any other language in the world Big companies like Netflix, PayPal, Walmart etc have built a lot of internal tools around it.
For all the frontend frameworks the core base is JavaScript.
The browser understands Javascript, and interaction with the website can be done with the help of Javascript.
Helps to write features for a website, it's also used at the backend i.e to interact with servers.
It is a logical layer of a website.
What can you do with JavaScript?
For a long time, JavaScript was only used in browsers for building interactive webpages.
Some developers referred to JavaScript as a toy language.
But today you can build web/Mobile applications, Real-time Networking Apps command line tools or even Games with JavaScript.
Where does JavaScript code run?
JavaScript was originally designed to run only in Browsers, hence every browser has a JavaScript Engine to run its code, for example, JavaScript Engine in Firefox and Chrome is Spider Monkey and V8.
In 2009 an Engineer name Ryan Dahl took the open-source JavaScript Engine in crome and embedded it in a C++ program and he called that program Node.
So a node is a C++ program that includes Google V8 JavaScript Engine.
And with the help of this, we can run the JS code outside of a browser.
Bowsers and Node provide the runtime environment for our code(JavaScript).
What's the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?
ECMAScript is just a specification or rule to write JavaScript code.
JavaScript confirms these specifications or rules set by ECMAScript.
The 1st version of ECMAScript was released in 1997, and since 2015 ECMA (ES2015 / ES6) has been working on annual releases of newer specifications.
These specifications define many new features of JavaScript.