Mentorship Session

Great 1:1 we had, I enjoyed it a lot. So now that I have it fresh, I am going to introduce a little summary, feel free to correct me if I don’t have something right. 🙂

We started talking about the history of JavaScript, since it is good to know where it all comes from, so we can have a better judgement in our future decisions and better understanding of the actual scenario.

JavaScript was born a long time ago in 1995 as a technology for Netscape, originally developed by Brendan Eich who results to be co-founder of Mozilla project.
The development of JavaScript had the purpose to be a complement of Java as an independent language for non professional programmers. (like Visual Basic for C)
Microsoft added support for JavaScript on internet explorer on august of 1996 and Netscape in November of the same year 1996 submitted it for standarization to Ecma International.

So the language was born, but the programmers didn’t wanted to code with JavaScript because its target audience consisted of web authors and other such “amateurs”, among other reasons.

But then Google changed everything in 2004 with Gmail and AJAX. It focused the attention on the language, because of the wonderful features that could be done with it, despite gmail was coded in Java and then ported to JavaScript.

In 2004 Jeff Atwood founded a very popular blog called Code Horror where he related the bad practices he found on the JavaScript world.

The browsers were really difficult to interact with, since Microsoft with the Internet Explorer weren’t following the standards and the web developers couldn’t see how everything was being processed, so it was quite a difficult time for web developers. So in 2004 Firefox was released to public, but until 2006 wasn’t launched the add-on Firebug that changed the way the developers could interact with the browsers and the code they were working on.

In 2006 Yahoo who was had the site developed in JavaScript launched the YUI Library that helped a lot of developers. The same year 2006 was launched JQuery that became very popular, even more popular than the JavaScript language, in fact, the job offers where posted searching for JQuey software developer, not JavaScript.

So at the time Douglas Crockford by 2002 launched JSON website who saw the potential on the JavaScript language. So he wrote in 2008 the book JavaScript: The good parts where he focused on the good parts of the language, and it helped a lot of programmers to see the true potential of JavaScript.

In 2009 was born Node.js in a search of an asynchronous way to interact with a website. Node.js was developed for JavaScript because of the lack of an existing I/O API, so they could start from scratch and define a convention of asynchronous, event-driven I/O. Node runs with the V8 developed by Google for Chrome.

I hope I got everything (or at least the big part) we talked about. Please feel free to make any comments or corrections.

Thanks! 🙂