by Martin Laws
"ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease." - Brendan Eich (Netscape)
As described in this Quora post, ESx is shorthand for ECMAScriptx/ECMAScript201x. ESx is not a scripting language, it is the set of standards that JavaScript is rooted in.
Here's a brief timeline of JavaScript, as authored by our friends at webapplog.com:
- 1995: JavaScript is born as LiveScript
- 1997: ECMAScript standard is established
- 1999: ES3 comes out and IE5 is all the rage
- 2000–2005: XMLHttpRequest, a.k.a. AJAX, gains popularity in app such as Outlook Web Access (2000) and Oddpost (2002), Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005)
- 2009: ES5 comes out (this is what most of us use now) with forEach, Object.keys, Object.create (specially for Douglas Crockford), and standard JSON
- 2015: ES6/ECMAScript2015 comes out
- 2017-202: We're still talking about ES6 like it's fancy and new, even though new specs now go into ES2020, which we could sloppily refer to as ES11, that's right, 11!
Open this project in your text editor of choice, and 'copy full path' to each topic's index.html, pasting it into your browser. You know what'd be real nice? Some in-browser project navigation. I'll work on it, but PRs are more than welcome!