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A Re-Introduction to JavaScript (JS Tutorial) - JavaScript | MDN

Metadata

  • Author: developer.mozilla.org
  • Full Title: A Re-Introduction to JavaScript (JS Tutorial) - JavaScript | MDN
  • Category: #Type/Highlight/Article
  • URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re-introduction_to_JavaScript

Highlights

  • JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich while he was an engineer at Netscape. JavaScript was first released with Netscape 2 early in 1996. It was originally going to be called LiveScript, but it was renamed in an ill-fated marketing decision that attempted to capitalize on the popularity of Sun Microsystem’s Java language — despite the two having very little in common. This has been a source of confusion ever since. (View Highlight)
  • Several months later, Microsoft released JScript with Internet Explorer 3. It was a mostly-compatible JavaScript work-alike. Several months after that, Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International, a European standards organization, which resulted in the first edition of the ECMAScript standard that year. The standard received a significant update as ECMAScript edition 3 in 1999, and it has stayed pretty much stable ever since. The fourth edition was abandoned, due to political differences concerning language complexity. Many parts of the fourth edition formed the basis for ECMAScript edition 5, published in December of 2009, and for the 6th major edition of the standard, published in June of 2015. (View Highlight)
  • Unlike most programming languages, the JavaScript language has no concept of input or output. It is designed to run as a scripting language in a host environment, and it is up to the host environment to provide mechanisms for communicating with the outside world. The most common host environment is the browser, but JavaScript interpreters can also be found in a huge list of other places, including Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, SVG images, Yahoo’s Widget engine, server-side environments such as Node.js, NoSQL databases like the open source Apache CouchDB, embedded computers, complete desktop environments like GNOME (one of the most popular GUIs for GNU/Linux operating systems), and others. (View Highlight)
  • Let’s start off by looking at the building blocks of any language: the types. JavaScript programs manipulate values, and those values all belong to a type. JavaScript’s types are: Number BigInt String Boolean Function Object Symbol (new in ES2015) (View Highlight)