Javascript history

Brendan Eich (creator of the JavaScript language) casually writes about how the language was created, and why it is what it is.

JS was obliged to "look like Java", only smaller, to be that little dumb brother for Java. In addition, it should have been written in 10 days, otherwise we would have something worse than JS.
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something like PHP, only worse. His boss, Netcsape, quickly “killed” (in July 1995, if memory serves me; I made JS at the beginning / middle of May), because This was the third language after Java and JS. It was hard to justify the fact that we have 2 new programming languages ​​for the web.
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At that time we had to move very fast, because knew that Microsoft was following us.
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Consider JavaScript (please, not “JScript”) to save you from VBScript.
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10 days to make a lexer, parser, bytecode compiler (bytecode emitter), interpreter, built-in classes and decompiler. Help was only with the jsdate.c file from Ken Smith from Netscape (which, by our overly optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date — Y2K bugs, etc. Gosling ...).

Sorry, there was little time to do the proper tail recursion optimization. 10 days with almost no sleep, to make JS from scratch, make it “look like Java” (I made it look like C), and secretly drag its saving chips there: first class functions (did the closure later, but they were part of the plan right away) and prototypes (something like the Self language).

I'll do better in the next life.