JavaScript is the programming language of the web browser. It was created at Netscape Communications Corporation by Brendan Eich, who, according to the history “JavaScript: The First 20 Years” that he co-wrote, “initially designed and implemented” the language “in May 1995 at Netscape.” The first prototype was code-named Mocha and took about ten days to build.
The language was first exposed to the public in September 1995, under the name LiveScript, as part of the first beta release of Netscape Navigator 2.0. On December 4, 1995, Netscape and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release that renamed it JavaScript and described it as “an object scripting language” used to write scripts that dynamically modify the properties and behaviors of Java objects. Despite the shared name, JavaScript and Java are distinct languages with very different designs, a fact the two companies’ marketing deliberately blurred.
JavaScript was designed to be a small, easy-to-use language whose code snippets could be embedded directly in web pages and interpreted by the browser as it rendered the page. This let pages respond to user actions and customize themselves on the fly, rather than only displaying static documents.
Because the web depends on many independent browsers interoperating, the language soon needed a formal standard. Standardization began in 1996 under Ecma International, and the first edition of the standard, ECMA-262, was published in 1997 under the name “ECMAScript.” JavaScript has since become one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.