JavaScript - Part 2: History January 27, 2025 on Kenneth Dodrill's blog

This post will be a bit shorter than the last one, simply because I don’t intend on writing out the entire history of JavaScript. If you would like to get a rundown in video form, I would recommend this video. You can also read some of the Wikipedia page for JS.


JavaScript was supposedly made in ten days (or so). Many people balk at this number (myself included), joking that “we could stop right there”. I think this is fairly justified, but maybe the developer (Brendan Eich) was just very productive at this time! You would think that the developer didn’t have the next thirty years in mind, but that leads me to my first point…

Something major you should know is that JavaScript was developed as a multi-paradigm programming language. This means that a developer could use different programming styles in the same programming language. For example, you are not locked into writing only OOP in JavaScript. If you have written many different types of JavaScript applications, then you know how this can go.

Knowing this, we can understand the place of ECMAScript, which is a standard for some scripting languages including JavaScript and JScript (Microsoft’s version of JavaScript that was used in Internet Explorer).

Each time ECMAScript changes, web browsers have to adapt. Users may be on old browsers. Therefore, tooling is necessary to transpile the code you write to other versions of ECMAScript, so that way users on older browsers can use your website.

Websites and the internet in general change rapidly, usually following whatever is most popular. Your website is not likely to be static. Shipping websites out on disk or some physical medium would be ridiculous because of this.

Additionally, it is unlikely that the typical user updates their web browser on their own. This has gotten better, but has also caused numerous complaints about the frequency of auto-updates.


We can finally answer our question of “Why can’t I just write code?” (for JavaScript). Because of the history of JavaScript, because JavaScript is not a compiled language, because there is a set standard that introduces new features and changes, and because users hate updating things (me too, man), backwards compatibility is a must.

Next week we will dive a little deeper into bundlers and modules.