It’s not only what you know: Ecma script

The first thing is why we need to learn about Ecma, So here is the answer To understand the real meaning of a javascript runtime environment, Kind of like video games, where you defeat small bosses and use that experience to defeat the big boss.

In 1993, the first web browser with a user interface called Mosaic was released

In 1994, the lead developers of Mosaic founded a company called Netscape and released a more polished browser called Netscape Navigator. Although it became increasingly popular it lacked the capability of dynamic behavior, web pages were status and there was no interactivity after a page was loaded.

To address this in 1995 Netscape created a new scripting language called Java script, The name was purely for marketing purposes as Java was a hot new language back then.

During the same time in 1995, Microsoft debuted its browser internet explorer. This led to a browser war with Netscape, Microsoft soon realize that javascript fundamentally changed the user experience of the web and wanted the same for internet explorer but there was no specification for them to follow.

In order to match Netscape’s Javascript in 1996 Microsoft reverse-engineered the navigator interpreter to create its own scripting language called Jscript. Jscript filled the same use case as Javascript but its implementation was different, This unfortunately created a problem, The differences made it difficult for developers to make their websites work well in both browsers in fact the two implementations were so different that best viewed in Netscape best viewed in Internet Explorer badges became common for most companies who couldn’t afford to build for both implementation.

To resolve this in November 1996 Netscape submitted Javascript to Ecma International now what is Ecma International, well it is an Industry association dedicated to the standardization of information and communication systems Netscape wanted a standard specification that all browser vendors could conform to as it would help keep other implementations consistent across browsers, Now for each new specification Ecma provides a standard specification and a committee.

In the case of javascript, the standard is called Eggman 262 and the is called technical committee 39 or tc39 for short. Techma however decided to use the term ecmascript to talk about the official language. The reason for this is because Oracle who acquired Microsystems owns the trademark for the term Javascript so Ecmascript refers to the standard language whereas javascript is what we use in practice and builds on top of Ecmascript over the years we’ve had many versions of Ecmascript released.

In 2015 also known as es6 the version that provides what we called modern Javascript features and has become a prerequisite for developing with javascript, Now here’s the funny bit although Ecmascript and Javascript are technically not the same the two words are often used interchangeably.