In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet

Thirty years ago today, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release announcing JavaScript, an object scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. The language emerged from 10 days of hard work at the leading browser company Netscape, where engineer Brendan Eich hacked a working internal prototype during May 1995.

While the JavaScript language did not ship publicly until that September and did not reach a 1.0 release until March 1996, descendants of Itch’s initial 10-day hack now run on about 98.9 percent of websites with client-side code, making JavaScript the Web’s dominant programming language. It is extremely popular; Beyond the browser, JavaScript also powers server backends, mobile apps, desktop software, and even some embedded systems. According to numerous surveys, JavaScript consistently ranks among the most widely used programming languages ​​in the world.

In creating JavaScript, Netscape wanted a scripting language that could make webpages interactive, something lightweight that would appeal to web designers and non-professional programmers. Eich drew from many influences: the syntax looked like a trendy new programming language called Java to satisfy Netscape management, but its boldness borrowed concepts from Scheme, a language that Eich admired, and Self, which contributed to JavaScript’s prototype-based object model.

The JavaScript Partnership received support from 28 major tech companies, but what’s interesting is that the December 1995 announcement now reads like an inscription in the tech industry. Supporting companies included Digital Equipment Corporation (Compaq, then absorbed by HP), Silicon Graphics (bankrupt), and Netscape (bought by AOL, destroyed). Sun Microsystems, co-creator of JavaScript and owner of Java, was acquired by Oracle in 2010. JavaScript left them all behind.

What is in a name?

The 10-day creation story has become programming folklore, but even with the truth we mentioned, it oversimplifies the timeline. Itch’s sprint produced a working demo, not a complete language, and over the next year, Netscape continued making changes to the design. Rapid development left JavaScript with quirks and inconsistencies that developers still complain about today. In fact, there were so many changes coming down the pipeline that it started to bother one of the most prominent people in the industry at the time.