05 June 2024
10 facts you might not know about Javascript
- The real name is not “Javascript”, but ECMAScript. ECMAScript is usually referred to when talking about the version of this language, but in reality, “Javascript” is a trademark registered by Sun Microsystems.
- It was born in 1995 and was created in 10 days by the programmer Brendan Eich. He created Javascript based on languages such as: Java, Perl, Scheme, HyperTalk, Self, and AWK.
- It was created to interact quickly with DOM elements and make animations, complementing the functionalities provided by the Java language.
- “undefined” is not a reserved word. Therefore, “undefined” can be defined, and although “null” is the total absence of value, in Javascript, “null” is an object.
- Strict equality “===” did not exist until 1999. Until then, there was no direct way to differentiate between a number and a string with the same value.
- Strict typing, which we can now work with in Typescript, was going to be implemented in ECMAScript 4.
- NaN (not a number) despite what its acronym means, its typeof is ‘Number’.
- Javascript would not be the same without the dozens of libraries, new implementations, derived languages, open-source Javascript engines, data exchange formats, etc. Among them, the most notable: Dynamic HTML, XMLHttpRequest, React, Angular, Vue, JSON, AJAX, JQUERY, V8, and Node.js.
- Like all other scripting languages, arrays and objects can be created with a brief shorthand syntax. These structure the basis of the JSON data format.
- Javascript is a single-threaded programming language, which means that accesses to different origins will be sequential, and all information cannot be processed until it has all been received. This then causes that parallel accesses to different origins cannot be launched to significantly improve performance. In these cases, asynchronous programming is usually used to avoid blocking the execution process until the task in question has been completed.
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