JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, and interpreted programming language. It has been standardized in the ECMAScript language specification. Alongside HTML and CSS, it is one of the three core technologies of World Wide Web content production; it is supported by all modern Web browsers without plug-ins in addition to being the only cross-browser scripting language.
Beginning of JavaScript
JavaScript was originally developed in 10 days in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, while he was working for Netscape Communications Corporation. JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages on the Web.
Features of JavaScript
- Imperative and Structured (Support much of C Programming feature).
- Dynamic typing.
- Run time evaluation.
- Object Oriented with the help of prototypes.
o Functions as object constructors
o Functions as methods
- Deligative
o Functions as Roles (Traits and Mixins)
o Object Composition and Inheritance
- Run-time environment
- Variadic functions
- Array and object literals
- Regular expressions
ES6 becomes latest JavaScript standard and added much more power to JavaScript. Here are some of the features:
- Default Parameters
- Template Literals
- Multi-line Strings
- Destructuring Assignment
- Enhanced Object Literals
- Arrow Functions in ES6
- Promises
- Block-Scoped Constructs Let and Const
- Classes
- Modules
You can learn more about ES6,
Usage of JavaScript world wide
JavaScript is everywhere. Most of modern browser support JavaScript and it is also supported in mobile devices. JavaScript is most popular and trending language on GitHub.
See the visualization chart referenced from githut.info.
![chart]()
Image Courtesy- githut.info/
Tools Build On JavaScript
Look at a mind map of tools build on JavaScript languages and used in different areas.
![area]()
Reference from: codefellows.org/blog/a-list-of-foundational-javascript-tools
Over the past decade, starting with jQuery empowering Web developers with client-side scripting, every popular plug-in has filled another gap in the language and its capabilities.
React.js and Angular extends HTML syntax to JavaScript, while streamlining the coding process with data binding and dependency injection.
D3.js Data visualization library extends how data represented on Web.
PDF.js Built with HTML5 and used for parsing and rendering PDFs.
Handlebar.js, Mustache.js and Jade are template engine to render html based on JSON data.
CoffeeScript and TypeScript are compiling syntax to JavaScript to support type checking and scoping.
Backbone, Ember and Grunt make Web application development run smoother and faster.
Apache Cordova and Bootstrap open JavaScript’s Mobile Web and app development possibilities.
Node.js, Express.js gives JavaScript the cross-platform runtime to conquer servers, embedded devices and more.
MongoDB, Postgresql gives power to backend open source database.
NPM and Bower are package management tools.
Grunt.js, Gulp.js and Browserify.js are building automation tools.
Cucumber.js, Jasmine, Mocha and Q-Unit are testing framework.
Underscore.js and Lo-Dash is powerful JavaScript utility library.
It's used as a scripting language in Unity3D for Game development.
Meteor Framework for building Full Stack real time application with the help of Node.js, MongoDB and Template Engine(React, Anguar or Blaze).
Cylon.js is a JavaScript framework for robotics, physical computing, and the Internet of Things. It makes it incredibly easy to command robots and devices.
There are many more tools which are built on JavaScript language nowadays.
Reference links
I have written articles from reference links as follow:
Conclusion
In this article we have learned that JavaScript language is used in every area starting with desktop, web, mobile, database, server and control hardware. Future of JavaScript is very bright.
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