Early 1995. Web designers needed a "glue" language to make their sites more dynamic.

Shamelessly stolen from https://dev.to/codediodeio/the-weird-history-of-javascript-2bnb

May 1995. Brendan Eich, under pressure to produce a prototype quickly with the threat of Microsoft beating them to the punch. He creates a language called Mocha.

September 1995. It is renamed to LiveScript for marketing reasons.

December 1995. It is renamed to JavaScript for marketing reasons.

August 1996. Microsoft reverse engineers JavaScript and ships it with Internet Explorer 3, but calls it JScript for marketing legal reasons.

November 1996. Microsoft is crushing their competition with an internal culture of "embrace, extend, and exterminate". Netscape submits documentation to standardize JavaScript with ECMA International. It gets finalize in June 1997.

March 2000. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is dominating with approx 90% of the browser market share. They contribute to ECMAScript, but mostly play by their own rules, shipping new features for JS in their browser. Most notably, AJAX sets the stage for the single page applications of the future.

August 2006. John Resig creates JQuery. The library addresses extremely-frustrating issues related to cross-browser compatibility that existed at the time. It also provides a well-documented terse API that sets a new standard for the "developer experience".

September 2008. Google releases the Chrome Browser and open-sources its high-performance runtime, called the V8 engine. It opens the door to new possibilities...

May 2009. Javascript goes Full Stack. Ryan Dahl develops NodeJS with Google's V8 project. It gives rise to the JavaScript Everywhere paradigm.

December 2009. Exactly 10 years after ES3 we finally see a new version of JavaScript - ES5. It adds a conservative set of new features based on ES3.1 like strict mode, accessors, and JSON.

October 2010. Both AngularJS and Backbone frameworks see their initial releases. They become extremely popular for different reasons - Angular was declarative and opinionated, while backbone was imperative and minimal. This marks the beginning of the modern single page application (SPA) and "framework churn".

May 2013. Facebook releases ReactJS. It sees rapid growth in the years ahead solidifies the declarative UI patterns used in many apps today.

Dozens of other frontend, backend, and fullstack frameworks emerge roughly around this time period, like Angular, Ember, Meteor, Sails, Vue, Svelte, Mithril, Knockout, Polymer, just to name a few.

• 2015 - present. A ton of new features land in ES6 changing the way modern JS devs write their code.
• 2015. let/const, arrow functions, classes, promises. Transpilers like Babel and Typescript.
• 2016 ES7. We get minor changes, like Array.includes(). Most importantly, ECMA is now making small changes on an annual basis.
• 2017 ES8. We get Async Await!
• 2018 ES9. We get Rest/Spread syntax!

Github Octoverse

Laurie Voss

How did JS become so popular

• Google maps and AJAX. AJAX made Javascript mainstream again, inspired by Gmail (2004) and google maps (2005).
• NodeJS introduced a single language for full-stack development.
• NPM packages.
• Frameworks that follow a 'write once work everywhere policy'.

What can Javascript do now?

Integrate with Sharepoint and Google Suite products

QR Codes

Desktop Apps

Machine Learning

Machine learning with dick pics

Game development

Game development

Team Treehouse, bundle

3D in the browser

Block Chain

Mobile Development

Occulus Rift

Docs, Lynda

Drones

Wes, another talk, getting started

Let's not forget...

POPUPS!

The future of JS?

Via Richard Feldman

• Typescript will continue to grow (growth)
• Web Assembly (Figma and Doom)
• That NPM will still be a major force (if not NPM then Github Packages or Yarn) (wiki)