Abstract

This talk presents the tumultuous history of JavaScript, from its first appearance in Netscape 2 beta releases in the fall of 1995 through the present, with emphasis on the unvarnished, real-world side of designing, implementing, shipping, and standardizing a functional programming language used by millions of people. JavaScript was conceived of as an “object-based scripting language”, but its inspiration came originally from Scheme, with an admixture of Self. Designing a language to fit the constraints of the target audience of HTML authors, the embedding browser application, and the market conditions of that time was challenging. We discuss what worked and what did not, and how the language evolved due to competition and de jure standardization. The talk ranges widely over the history of the web, including the recent renaissance of JavaScript and its development in the ECMA standards group. We close by presenting new work likely to appear in the next version of the language.