30 years later it is the glue that keeps the internet alive

Three decades ago, a joint release from Netscape and Sun Microsystems introduced the world to JavaScript, a scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. Behind that press release A story of technological survival was hidden: said language had been born months before, the result of a frenetic ten-day sprint led by engineer Brendan Eich. What began as a hurried prototype to give life to the netscape browserhas today become the infrastructure that supports a huge percentage of the visible web.

The myth of ten days. The legend tells that Eich wrote the core JavaScript in just over a week. And it is true, but the result was a hybrid of influences. Pressured by Netscape management to make the language more like Java, Eich adopted a syntax of curly braces and semicolons.

However, under the hood, it injected the functional elegance of Scheme and Self’s prototype-based object model. This mix, born out of haste, left a legacy of technical inconsistencies that developers still suffer from (and love) today.

From Mocha to confusion. You may not know that the language was not always called that. It was born as Mocha, became LiveScript and was finally named JavaScript in a marketing maneuver to take advantage of the popularity of Java. What’s more, the confusion over names continues to this day among less knowledgeable users: but Java and JavaScript have the same thing to do with each other. car (car) and carpet (rug), as is usually answered when someone asks about their differences.

The strategy worked, but angered rivals like Microsoft. His response was to create his own version called JScript, something that caused notable fragmentation that made Bill Gates himself complain about Netscape’s constant changes. To bring order to the chaos, the language ended up being established in 1997 under the name ECMAScript.

Image by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Ajax and the conquest of the server. For years, JavaScript was seen as a toy for doing simple validations, but that all changed in 2005 with the arrival of AJAX. This technology It allowed websites like Gmail or Maps to update data without reloading the page: the step was taken from static websites to dynamic apps.

The second leap occurred in 2009 with Node.js, which took JavaScript out of the browser and onto the server. Key for developers to use a single language for the entire stack and which now involves between two and three million packages in the npm registry.

Absolute domain. Despite the emergence of modern rivals, the hegemony of JavaScript is indisputable. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow surveycontinues to be the language most used by 62% of developers, something that puts them ahead of others such as Python or SQL.

Its ubiquity is such that it has transcended the web: it powers desktop apps using Electron, mobile development with React Native and even AI tools. It is the default language for learning to program and chosen by 60% of students.

This mass success has brought with it a complexity in the JavaScript ecosystem:

• Frameworks like React, Angular and Vue dominate the market (used by 40% of web developers).
• The weight of libraries is beginning to take its toll on the performance of the web.
• Therefore, predictions for 2026 point to a resurgence of pure JavaScript either Vanilla JavaScript.

Forced maturity. Despite its birth defects, JavaScript was able to evolve. In 2015, the ES6 update radically transformed the syntax, but the real paradigm shift came from Microsoft: with the TypeScript creationa layer of security and types was added that solved much of the original chaos, something that allowed it to become the almost mandatory standard for professional development. JavaScript is still the engine, but TypeScript is the precision flywheel.

A legal problem called Oracle. The paradox of JavaScript is that, despite being an open standard, its name is proprietary. Oracle inherited the “JavaScript” trademark after purchasing Sun Microsystems, although it has never released a product with that name. Recently, key figures such as Brendan Eich himself and the creator of Node.js have signed a request so that the US patent office can cancel the trademark due to abandonment.

The legacy of a hack. It is ironic that the companies that sponsored his birth have disappeared or been absorbed, while his creation remains more alive than ever. Authoritative voices like Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) have come to suggest they should “retire” it for its basic design flaws, but the reality is that the modern web would not exist without it.

JavaScript is not just code; is the lingua franca of the internet, the invisible glue that turns static documents into digital experiences. Without its existence, the network would only be a collection of texts and images without movement, something similar to a PDF newspaper that we see on our screen.

In Xataka | There is a shadow giant pulling all the technological strings that connect TikTok with AI: Oracle