JavaScript is super widely used - 69.7% of programmers according to Stack Overflow #YOW19
Lots of myths and tales about the history of JS and how certain things came to be. #YOW19
Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released when I was one month old... #YOW19 
Tim Berners-Lee objected to the <img> tag being included in the first release of Mosaic 😮 #YOW19
"Java for browser" ah yes, we know how that went... #YOW19
Two languages in the browser? Why? Need a light weight scripting language #YOW19
Brendan goes away for 10 days, comes back with "Mocha" #YOW19
Imagine how much recruiter confusion would have been saved if it had stayed "Mocha"... #YOW19
Ultimately the big difference between Java in the browser and Mocha/LiveScript/JavaScript in the browser was the DOM - JS could interact with and manipulate HTML elements. #YOW19
Here comes Microsoft! They were reverse engineering JavaScript before it was even released under that name... #YOW19
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1,2, and then announced that a scripting version of Visual Basic would be the standard for browsers. #YOW19
First JS didn't have things like undefined, strict equality, nested functions, anonymous functions, profotgpsl inheritance, arrays, literals, regex, garbage collector... #YOW19
It didn't have classes because it was forbidden. Classes are for "real programmers" who will use Java, so Brendan wasn't allowed to ship them in JavaScript... #YOW19
This is why it went down the road of prototypal inheritance instead of classes... #YOW19
Original Mocha just had "==" but it *was* strict. But they got complaints because they wanted to be able to do '"404" == 404' and such for response codes.................. #YOW19
Also coercion of empty string to 0 for if users leave a form field blank that's meant to have a number. #YOW19
This shows that it's not always good to be responsive to users, unless you have a good sense of when to push back. #YOW19
Internet Explorer 3 shipped in 1996 with both "JScript" (their JS) and VBScript. #YOW19
What a mess! Need standards. First Ecma TC39 standardisation meeting at end of 1996. #YOW19
JavaScript 1.2 "SpiderMonkey"! #YOW19
How to standardise? W3C didn't think there should be a language in the browser, IETF didn't do this sort of thing. ECMA! #YOW19
That meeting decided to use the Microsoft specification, not NetScape, and only to start with version 1.1 features. #YOW19
ES1! #YOW19
Whoa. ECMAScript could have been "RadScript". #YOW19
Competing designs from Microsoft and Netscape for JS error handling. #YOW19
Now comes "ten years of wandering in the desert" trying to redesign JavaScript #YOW19
Attempt 1 resulted in ActionScript... #YOW19
Attempt 2 didn't mesh with "Browser Game Theory" #YOW19
