JavaScript creator ponders past, future

Mozilla's Brendan Eich describes JavaScript's history, the upcoming upgrade, and disagreements with Microsoft

 

Brendan Eich created JavaScript, the popular scripting language being used to liven up Internet applications. Coupled with XML, JavaScript has become part of the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technique popular in Web development. InfoWorld recently met with Eich to talk about JavaScript: where it has been and where it is headed. Eich, who serves as chief technology officer at Mozilla, also commented on other languages and about working with Microsoft in developing standards.

[ Take a tour of today's Internet-oriented dynamic scripting languages. ]

InfoWorld: As I understand it, JavaScript started out as Mocha, then became LiveScript and then became JavaScript when Netscape and Sun got together. But it actually has nothing to do with Java or not much to do with it, correct?

Eich: That’s right. It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.

InfoWorld: What’s the difference between ECMAScript and JavaScript, or are they one and the same?

Eich: ECMAScript is the standards name for the language. Its number is ECMA-262 and it’s a name that the standards body came up with because they couldn’t get anybody to donate a trademark that was agreeable to all parties. So there’s an issue with marketing the programming languages.

JavaScript would have been the ideal name because that’s what everyone called it and that’s what the books call it. Microsoft couldn’t get a license from Sun so they called their implementation JScript. So ECMA wanted to call it something and they couldn’t get anybody to donate or they couldn’t get everybody to agree to a donation of the trademark, so they ended up inventing ECMAScript, which sounds a little like a skin disease. Nobody really wants it.

And so you have this funny [situation] where you have a standard with a funny name or number and then various implementations that have trade names. And the trade names don’t have a huge value, except JavaScript is the common name. It’s in all the books, it’s what people say. It’s what people refer to on "Saturday Night Live."[Editor's note: JavaScript once merited mention during a skit on the show.]

InfoWorld: What was your main goal in developing JavaScript?

Eich: The idea was to make something that Web designers, people who may or may not have much programming training, could use to add a little bit of animation or a little bit of smarts to their Web forms and their Web pages.

So it’s 1995, the Web is very early. HTML was 3.2, I think, or something like that. People did not have much programmability. Java was coming along at the same time but it required you to use a high-powered programming language and then run a compiler and put your code into a package that became an applet that was part of the page but it was in a little silo. It was kind of walled off.