Free from the financial and personal insecurity of the 20s, and not yet approaching the midlife challenges of the 40s and 50s, the 30s are often said to be the best years of your life, both for their freedom and responsibility.
Well, happy 30th birthday, Javascript. I’m sure I won’t be the only developer unbundling my praise for the lingua franca of the web this spring (the anniversary was in May). As JavaScript turns 30, I hope you’ll indulge me on a little trip down memory lane.
The Birth of JavaScript
Sometime in May of 1995, tasked with the responsibility to develop a new scripting language for the browser, Brendan Eich came up with the prototype of Javascript, which shipped with a new version of Netscape Navigator effectively unchanged later that year. This was Agile pre-Manifesto! In Eich’s own telling, the goal with Javascript was to create a language that “was easy to use by amateurs and novices…a “glue language” for the Web designers and part time programmers”[*]. Based on my own experience, he nailed it.
I was in middle school when Eich entered his infamous 10-day bender flow state to create Javascript, and I have fond memories of simply making boxes move around and content appear and disappear on a webpage at the touch of a button. It sounds basic and maybe even boring, but the playground of the browser was approachable and fun, and I got hooked on the world of possibilities it opened up for me. I really feel I owe my entire career in software development to that early exposure to Javascript in its infancy.
From Humble Beginnings
Javascript has come a long way since its humble beginnings. From its inception, it would be 13 years before Douglas Crockford’s seminal Javascript: The Good Parts was published in 2008. At the time, I was early in my professional career, and managing an eCommerce site with plenty of custom JS. That book was a watershed for me, both in how it exposed the problems of the language (all the “good parts” fitting into just a 172-page paperback) but also validating its growing power as the backbone of the internet economy.
Now in 2025, JS:TGP is a relic, with so much of the syntax and the idioms in the book having evolved or been superseded. We’ve replaced var with let and const, this with arrow functions, prototypes with actual Classes, etc. (forgive my brevity, I’m skipping over a lot of nuance here, this isn’t a technical article on the growth of the Javascript language). Even the core identity of JS as a dynamic scripting language that won’t hesitate to coerce any value to any other is shifting with the growing popularity of Typescript.
The blogosphere is riddled with articles about the difficulty of just getting started with a new JS project these days. I believe that JS is still an approachable language for a beginning programmer and a great way to start learning software development, but it has become so much more than that. There are entire careers now built around familiarity with just a single specific JS-based application framework (React, Angular, Vue, etc.), and dozens of tech conferences every year dedicated strictly to the latest and greatest elements of the JS ecosystem.
Historical Precedents
Although the advent of AI has been heralded far more than Javascript was in the beginning, I think there are some interesting parallels here. We’re still in an extremely early stage of AI experimentation, shifting interfaces and competing standards. Anyone who was around for JScript or remembers the pain of managing 20 different browser shims must be feeling equally perturbed by prompt engineering, tool-calling APIs, and frequent model updates.
And AI tools hold a promise that any “amateur…part time programmer” can now create useful applications. AI can enable and make accessible things that previously were only the domain of a limited group of specialists. There are many people that view this prospect with a mixture of fear (AI is taking our jobs) and derision (we’ll be inundated with AI slop), and yeah, those are legitimate concerns. But Javascript also provides a lesson in the way a technology that opens new doors can end up creating whole new professional fields. Just as I came to programming with the birth of JS, I’m sure there are young kids right now whose exposure to AI code generation will lead them into successful careers down the road, and it won’t look anything like the early vibe coding of today.
Ultimately, the historical course of technology developments is impossible to predict. We do our best in the moment to make choices with the information we have available. Sometimes years of work and investment leads to dead ends or regrettable mistakes (RIP Minidisc, 11/1992-03/2013), but sometimes a frenetic 10-day hackathon births the foundation for the next major development paradigm.
Happy Birthday, JavaScript!
So here’s to another 30 years of Javascript. May you live as long as COBOL, birth as many progeny as C, and become as beloved as Rust. 🥂
[*] “I spent about ten days in May 1995 developing the interpreter, including the built-in objects except for the Date class…I spent the rest of 1995 embedding this engine in the Netscape browser and creating what has become known as the “DOM”…I was the lone JS developer at Netscape until mid-1996.”
https://a-z.readthedocs.io/en/latest/javascript.html