How JavaScript Happened: A Short History of Programming Languages
summary
Chronicles the concrete lineage from Ada and Babbage’s notes through ENIAC, Fortran’s 80‑column punch cards and Lisp’s heap/garbage‑collection to Simula’s classes and Self’s prototypal inheritance, arguing that JavaScript is essentially a Scheme‑style demo created in 10 days for Netscape Navigator 2.0. Shows actual artifacts (punch cards, APL keyboards), many FizzBuzz implementations (FizzBuzz implemented a dozen times), and the design choices that stuck — asterisk for multiply, I as loop index, dynamic typing — and how the demo became the world’s dominant language.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:06Ada Lovelace and Babbage
- 3:18Wartime computing and Enigma
- 5:50Eniac and mainframe computing
- 8:36Fortran and early standards
- 14:41Algol and structure
- 19:05Lisp and functional origins
- 22:21Simula and objects
- 24:09APL and dynamic types
- 26:19B, BCPL, and syntax
- 28:06The C revolution
- 30:46Smalltalk and virtual machines
- 34:16ML, Scheme, and JavaScript
- 38:14C++ and prototype inheritance
- 41:34JavaScript's evolution
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