JavaScript is a lightweight script. It has many names. Live Script and ECMAScript and so on. All PCs that need to access web pages will need the JavaScript interpreter program installed. JavaScript became popular by virtue of its closeness with the World Wide Web. Now JavaScript is probably the dominant scripting language of the World Wide Web, and is yet to be overtaken by a new scripting language for dynamic websites.
Yet, JavaScript is not understood well as it should be. Many people with no knowledge of computers and internet think that JavaScript is related to the Java programming platform. However similar JavaScript’s name is with Java, the uses of both are completely different. While Java is a heavyweight programming languages that directly interacts with the system, JavaScript is not.
Syntactically speaking JavaScript has similarities with Java. Like Java which is derived from the C programming language, JavaScript is not derived from Java. Sun Microsystems were the original makers of Java. Netscape are the original makers of JavaScript. JavaScript’s initial name was Live Script. It was later renamed to JavaScript. The script suffix easily suggests that it is not a programming language at all.
JavaScript has similarities in its syntax with the C programming language. The For, While, If, If Else statements are all vintage C. Yet, JavaScript is not derived from C. It is based on languages like Lisp and Scheme.
JavaScript is not a perfect scripting language. It does have scope for improvement in its functional design. Some of them are the use of the plus sign to function as addition as well concatenation. A lot of errors come through due to this operand. It has been seen that the ‘with’ statement when used in JavaScript causes a lot of errors.
The problem that JavaScript scripting language is facing is no proper documentation on it for people to learn it effectively. Once that’s fixed, JavaScript will no longer be the misunderstood scripting language.