|
Originally devised to enhance web pages in Netscape 2.0, JavaScript is now
faced with being a single-threaded language in a multimedia, multitasking,
multicore world. Yet JavaScript has not only persevered since 1995, it’s
thrived. One after the other, potential rivals in the browser—Flash, Silverlight,
and Java applets, to name a few—have come and (more or less) gone.
Meanwhile, when a programmer named Ryan Dahl wanted to build a new
framework for event-driven servers, he searched the far reaches of computer
science for a language that was both dynamic and single-threaded before
realizing that the answer was right in front of him. And so, Node.js was born,
and JavaScript became a force to be reckoned with in the server world.
How did this happen? As recently as 2001, Paul Graham wrote the following
in his essay “The Other Road Ahead”:
I would not even use JavaScript, if I were you… Most of the JavaScript I see on
the Web isn’t necessary, and much of it breaks.
Today, Graham is the lead partner at Y Combinator, the investment group
behind Dropbox, Heroku, and hundreds of other start-ups—nearly all of which
use JavaScript. As he put it in a revised version of the essay, “JavaScript now
works.”
When did JavaScript become a respectable language? Some say the turning
point was Gmail (2004), which showed the world that with a heavy dose of
Ajax you could run a first-class email client in the browser. Others say that
it was jQuery (2006), which abstracted the rival browser APIs of the time to
create a de facto standard. (As of 2011, 48 percent of the top 17,000 websites
use jQuery.) |
