How JavaScript became popular—recap

The JavaScript explosion was initiated by a series of events from 2008 to 2015

To round up this story of how JavaScript was transformed from a bad, hated and little-used language to an immensely popular, powerful and somewhat decent language, here are some of the most important events:

• 2008: Google releases Chrome, which includes the incredibly fast V8 JavaScript engine

• 2009: Ryan Dahl creates Node.js, a command-line JavaScript engine based on V8

• 2013: Facebook creates React, a JavaScript framework for building UIs

• 2014: Sebastian McKenzie creates Babel, a compiler that transforms from one version of JavaScript to another

• 2015: ECMA publishes the final version of ES6 aka ES2015, a much better version of JavaScript

This concise list is not very informative, so if you are interested but haven’t read my previous posts it’s better to do so, starting from “How JavaScript became popular—part 1”.

What did the Python people and other non-JavaScript people do during this revolution? This is a story for next time.