JavaScript Comes of Age

JavaScript will be 20 years old next year (counting from when it first debuted in the Netscape browser). It's a language with a chequered history and carries a lot of baggage from its early years, but as it leaves its teenage years behind it, I think it's a language that has now finally grown up.

JavaScript revolutionized the web by allowing scripts to run in a browser. But after its initial popularity it soon started to get a bad reputation and was often associated with poorly written, cut-and-pasted code that was used to create annoying pop-ups and cheesy 'effects'. The phrase DHTML became a dirty word in web development. JavaScript also had some annoying shortcomings as a programming language.

But, despite all of its problems, JavaScript has something that other languages don't have - reach and ubiquity. It only requires a browser to run, which means that anybody with a computer or smartphone is capable of running a JavaScript application. JavaScript has achieved the dream that Java had of being available on all platforms by using the browser as its virtual machine. And it can now run without a browser thanks to the development of engines such as Node.js.

JavaScript also has a low barrier to entry when it comes to development; since all you need to write a program is a simple text editor. It is the most popular language on GitHub by a number of measures. This means that there is a lot of JavaScript code out there and many problems have already been solved, often in many different ways. It also means that help is often easy to come by and libraries of code are very well tested.

After an awkward first decade, JavaScript spent its teenage years growing up. The revolution started with the advent of Ajax, when people started to sit up and take JavaScript seriously. jQuery then got people using JavaScript to build some serious applications and Node has taken it all to a whole new level. People have started to recognize that JavaScript is a powerful and flexible language with some cool features such as:

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by Darren Jones via SitePoint