JavaScript and I are birthday twins. I’d probably remember its birth had I not still been a kid who just discovered LEGO, books and the multiplication table. In 1995, I had not even seen a computer. We were barely five years past the Berlin Wall falling and the Iron Curtain being lifted. Computers in Eastern Europe were the last thing on our minds. Yet on the other side of the world, something pivotal happened. Something that enabled the web and technology as we know it today. That something was called JavaScript, and nobody cared. Windows 1995 was all the new rage, why would anyone care about some silly scripting language?

A rollercoaster history of JS

Apart from maybe Brendan Eich, the leadership of Netscape and Sun Microsystems, nobody really knew just how pivotal of a moment the 4th of December would become for every single internet user today.

One of the perhaps lesser-known facts about JavaScript’s inception is that it was never intended to become a language. The goal with the hiring of Brendan Eich was to integrate the Scheme language into Netscape, while in parallel trying to integrate Java as well. But as the famous Hungarian saying goes, “when you chase two rabbits, you’ll catch none” and it applies here as well. As we know now, neither Java nor Scheme became part of our browsers, and Netscape’s management decided to stop chasing rabbits and instead develop a new language entirely that in syntax was closer to Java than Scheme.

The JavaScript name still confuses many, but ultimately was nothing but a marketing ploy by Netscape to piggyback on Java’s success during the dot-com boom.

Until its official release in December, the language wasn’t even called JavaScript, but LiveScript, and 28 years later, I still think that name is far more suitable than what Netscape’s management decided to go with. Especially since Web 2.0 and the introduction of Ajax, one of the main benefits of JavaScript is its ability to enable live web applications that do not require page reloads.