History of Javascript Programming Language
JavaScript Programming Language developed by Brenden Eich in 1995. When he was working with Netscape company. Who doesn’t know about Netscape. Let me tell you that Netscape was the most popular web browser in the world of the Internet. In 1995 when Microsoft started development of Internet Explorer. Then Netscape came into a big danger and tried to flop and stop the development of Internet Explorer. That’s why Netscape wanted to bring major change into web technology. Sun, who is an american internet company, was working on the Java programming language. That time Java was very popular for software development. That time JavaScript Programming language was being developed. But that time its name wasn’t JavaScript, it was LiveScript. Due to the popularity of the Java programming language, LiveScript changed the name and called it JavaScript.
JavaScript was implemented in Netscape. That time Microsoft didn’t remain silent. They also developed their own version of JavaScript that they named Jscript. Due to some trademark issues Microsoft named Jscript. The first version of JScript was released in August, 1996. And it was implemented in Internet Explorer 3. After this Netscape also launched their own JavaScript Engine that was called SpiderMonkey. Which is still used in Firefox.
After the public release of JavaScript in 1996, ECMA company also developed their own version of JavaScript that they named first iJavaScript. But due to some trademark issues they renamed it to EcmaScript. Generally there is no difference in EcmaScript and Javascript Programming Language. EcmaScript’s first version was released in 1997. And it’s second version was released in 1998. After that EcmaScript released their other version EcmaScript 3. EcmaScript 3 changed the history of JavaScript. Publicly it was very successful because it have a lots of new features like:
- Regular Expression
- Do While Block
- Try and Catch Block
- New Features For String and Array
This version of EcmaScript was released in 1999. Netscape navigator released their version 3 and they implemented EcmaScript 3. After the one and half year Firefox came into industry, which was based on Netscape Navigator. It also supports EcmaScript 3. And Internet Explorer 3 also supports EcmaScript 3.
After the success of EcmaScript 3, they started building the EcmaScript 4. And here the developers are divided into 2 groups.
First group of developers said that we should add new features into it, to make it strong. And the other group of developers is drying to delay the releasing date due to its complexity. When EcmaScript development stopped then Adobe and Microsoft were releasing their own versions of JavaScript. Like Adobe developed ActionScript and Microsoft developed Jscript.NET. So EcmaScript developers spent 8 years developing the new version of EcmaScript. Then EcmaScript 4 was released with the .E4X extension. It was used by SpiderMonkey. But this version flopped and became a big failure for ECMA company. ECMA started working on EcmaScript 5 in 2008 after the failure of ES 4. Developers ignored the ES 4 idea and they made EcmaScript 3 as a base in the development of EcmaScript 5.
In the new version of EcmaScript developers added many new features like Class, Object, getters, setters, Json etc. EcmaScript 5 was released in 2014, and it was very successful. After this ECMA started releasing new versions every year. Like EcmaScript 6 in 2015 and EcmaScript 7 in 2016.
If you have worked in EcmaScript 6 then you felt that there are many modern approaches which are very useful for developers, like Fat arrow functions, filters, etc.
Overall on JavaScript many companies worked and after the hard work of many years. Now we have the latest, powerful and full featured version of JavaScript.
Why is JavaScript the Future?
Before starting about the JavaScript future I want to explain something about types of web developments. There are two types of web development: front-end and backend-development. In front-end development there are few languages which run on client side computers. These languages use your computer to run the website programs and to render the web elements. Like CSS, HTML, JavaScript and Jquery. These are client side languages. And there are some languages which run on Server. When you open any page that has been coded using server side languages, Server runs and processes that page and then shows the result. While in front-end or client side languages, the web browser processes these languages and renders the web page to show the result. So the HTML and CSS are not any programming languages. You can say that they are used to create and design the structure of the language using some predefined tags and elements. But the programming language is JavaScript. And JavaScript is a very powerful language. Let me tell you a fact that JavaScript has 95% shares of the Whole world of the web.
JavaScript programming language is the one language that is used in websites. It means when you want to work on the backend side or server side you have many options, like you can use PHP, ASP.NET, Python, etc. But if you say about frontend, so only JavaScript is the option if you want to work advance and want to make a powerful application.You can do some amazing work with JavaScript programming language. Like you can build online games which run on a web browser, you can form validations and even you can add some effects and animations to your webpage to make it look and feel better.
After discussing this lets discuss why JavaScript is the future? As I said above that 95% of the world of the web uses JavaScript. So you can go in any field you will see there are many job and career opportunities in the JavaScript field. Because JavaScript is growing speedly and will remain for a long time. And development in JavaScript will never stop. You can find that day by day the number of frameworks and libraries of JavaScript programming languages are increasing. And they are making JavaScript more interesting and worthy. Some of the popular frameworks are like Angular, ReactJs, VueJS, Knockout Js etc. By using these frameworks you can even create some enterprise level applications. So if you want to make your future in JavaScript and want to become an advanced developer, You must learn the JavaScript language. But you should note that before learning JavaScript, You should have knowledge of HTML, CSS and Bootstrap. Because if you only learn plain JavaScript and didn’t learn CSS, HTML and Bootstrap. So you cannot get benefit only with implementation of JavaScript.
Salaries of JavaScript Programming Language Developers
According to top ranking sites like Indeed, Payscale and Salary Expert, JavaScript developer salary in the US lies within $84,638 to $117,201 per year. And the average salary of a JavaScript developer is $99,846 per year.
In Germany, the average salary of a JavaScript developer is $52,904 per year. While in the Netherlands it is a bit lower at about $51,485 per year.
So Average salary of a JavaScript developer is $84,628 per year. These salaries vary according to your experience. If you have great experience in the market then you can earn a much handsome income.
Features of JavaScript Programming Language
JavaScript have many features and I have divided these features into two parts:
General JavaScript Programming Language Features
JavaScript programming language consists of many awesome general features. Some of the best features are as follows:
1. Validating User’s Input
JavaScript is very useful when you want to validate your web forms. When a user leaves a form field empty and tries to submit the form while emptying that field that is compulsory to fill. JavaScript checks that field and if the field is empty then it shows some validation errors that you set up using JavaScript. And without filling that field javascript didn’t send a request to the server.
2. Simple Client-side Calculations
JavaScript is very useful when you want to do some calculations on the frontend side. Especially in that case when a user does many repeated calculations on the website. In that case you cannot send requests to the server every time. This could be very costly in time and could be very slow in performance. So JavaScript helps you to achieve these calculations done one the client side.
3. Greater Control
You cannot rely all your needs to the server and cannot fully depend on the server. Sometimes you need some extra features which are necessary from the web browser means on the client side. So JavaScript provides you many such features that reduces your server load and network traffic as well.
4. Platform Independent
The one of the best features in JavaScript programming language is that it is platform independent language. That means it runs on a web browser. So it is the web browser’s responsibility to compile and compatibility issues. So with this JavaScript can run on Windows, Mac OS and all other platforms which are Netscape-supported systems. Also you can embed this language to all other scripts like HTML language.
5. Handling Dates and Time
Like other programming languages JavaScript also have it’s built-in functionalities to manage and determine date and time. And it is very simple to code by using some useful methods like .getDate().
6. Generating HTML Content
Another great feature of JavaScript is that you can easily manipulate HTML structure. You can generate text fields, select lists, you can delete or add divs to documents. Like if you want to delete an input field when a button is clicked, so you can do this by using JavaScript.
7. Detecting the User’s Browser and OS
JavaScript is a very powerful language in detecting a user’s browser and OS information. Let say if you want to build a platform dependent application. So you can easily detect the web browser or OS of any machine easily by using their built-in APIs and functions. And can control your application on every operating system and web browser.
Modern JavaScript Programming Language Features
If we start discussing modern JavaScript features. These could be countless and our articles could be more lengthy to describe all the modern JavaScript features. So here we have described some most useful and important modern features of JavaScript. Which you should know and must use in your applications.
1. Let/Const
If you are familiar with JavaScript then you should know that in the modern JavaScript features java introduced some of the great features that are special keywords like “let” and “const” that are very useful and replace the “var” keyword. But they restrict the scope of the variable. Let sy by defining a variable let you can access the variable only in the block. But we define a variable using the var even in a block. You can access it outside the block as well.
2. Arrow Functions
JavaScript Arrow Functions are very useful when you want to decrease the number of codes by writing the functions in traditional and lengthy style. You can use the arrow functions that shorten your code and make more beautiful indentation as compared to traditional old style of writing functions. And it is very useful when you want to write anonymous functions in JavaScript.
3. Template Literal
When you are stuck and feel very difficult to write your strings into multiple lines by concatenating them. Then you can use the Template Literals in JavaScript. It is great feature when you want to write your code into multiple lines that have strings and variables in your code.
4. New Array Functions
When you are working on JavaScript arrays. Then you need some of the built in functions which you want to apply on your data to do work work quickly. So JavaScript provides you many new array functions. Which you can easily use and can do many operations on arrays. JavaScript supports regular arrays and also multidimensional arrays as well. Regular arrays use the numbers in indexes and multidimensional arrays use some of the associative strings as keys to their values that you define custom. And you can perform many operations using JavaScript array functions.
5. Default Parameters
Let say you want a function, that if you don’t pass a value to it’s parameter it gets a default value automatically and you don’t want to see any syntax error. So JavaScript provides you default parameters of the functions. You can assign some default values to the function parameter. And when you will not pass the parameter to the function then it uses the default value of parameter which you predefined when you created that function.
6. Property Shorthand
JavaScript provides you some shorthand properties instead of writing full code or writing the name of the variables again and again. You can use the shorthand properties that will save your time and prevent you from writing small but irritating variables or functions again and again. Here is an example of property shorthand features.
var s = ‘abc’;
var n = 1;
var o = { s, n }; // This is equivalent to { s: s, n: n }
Summary
Overall JavaScript is a great language. And I prefer you to learn the JavaScript in your file at least once if you are a programmer. You will enjoy it very much. And it is very light weight but most powerful like the other languages. You can resolve and do all of your web development work on the front-end side by using JavaScript. And even some more server side operations as well like form validation. And once you are a good developer and will have a great experience of many years then you will get a handsome salary which you will be proud of.
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