Programming Windows: Hello, JavaScript (Premium)

The origin of JavaScript is one of the more interesting stories I’ve come across while researching this article series. And while it’s a bit of a sideshow in the context of Windows application development, JavaScript would go on to become the most popular and influential programming language in the world. It would also impact Microsoft and Windows multiple times over the ensuing 25 years, as the software giant adapted its flagship desktop OS multiple times to address JavaScript’s ongoing impact on the industry.

There are probably many good sources of JavaScript history, but I highly recommend listening to episode 124 of the JavaScript Jabber podcast, in which JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich discusses the inside story of the origin and evolution of the language. It’s a fascinating discussion.

The short version goes like this: Even from its earliest days, Netscape envisioned the World Wide Web as an applications platform that could defeat Microsoft and its Navigator web browser as the GUI that could defeat Windows. To realize this goal, however, Netscape had to evolve Navigator to be extensible and programmable.

That began to happen with Navigator 2.0, which Netscape announced in September 1995 and released in final form three months later. Navigator 2.0 was “a full suite of Internet applications,” meaning that it came with email and threaded discussion groups (newsgroups) in addition to the browser. (And a “Gold” version would add a web page editor with “one-button publishing.) But the browser itself was “a desktop engine for … live online applications” thanks to its support for Java applets, which were mini client-server applications, plug-ins, which allowed third parties to extend Navigator with new capabilities, and LiveScript, a simple Java-like scripting language.

LiveScript was renamed to JavaScript before Navigator 2.0 shipped in December 1995. “JavaScript scripts are mini-applications that enable live updating, two-way interaction and platform-independent, client/server live applications on the Internet,” Netscape explained of its new language at the time. Web pages, then as now, were constructed using simple HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code, and JavaScript was designed to run within those documents, interacting with headings, text, graphics, and other objects.

As such, JavaScript was object-based or, as Eich called it, “objects without the classes,” the latter of which serve as templates for object instances in real OOP languages. It was also exactly the right level of usability/difficulty to trigger mass acceptance among both beginners and more advanced and professional developers, a first since Visual Basic.

Back in 1996, one might write a simple (and static) Hello, world­­-style web page like so.
<HTML>
    <HEAD>
        <TITLE>Hello, HTML!</TITLE>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>
        <H1>Hello, HTML!</H...

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