JavaScript’s Evolution in a Nutshell: Basically Game of Thrones

1995: Early Days

In the beginning, Brendan Eich hacked together “Mocha” in ten days.
It was originally conceived as a Scheme port for Navigator. This was the job he was hired to do.
Netscape decided it wanted to be like the cool kids and requested a Java-y veneer over Mocha’s lispy guts
In December, Mocha-cum-LiveScript was renamed to JavaScript, arguably for marketing purposes

Microsoft embraced and extended JavaScript for IE (and also IIS), birthing JScript
At the same time it introduced VBScript, but we won’t talk about that
In November, Netscape submitted JS to Ecma International for standardization

In June ‘97, ECMAScript first edition is finalized as ECMA-262
A year later, in June ‘98, ES2 is released. CSS level 2 was published in May
The DOM is introduced in October. It also sucks, but allows JS to manipulate the document tree directly instead of just injecting html
Senate acquits Bill Clinton, ending the Lewinsky/Starr impeachment story arc
December ‘99, ES3 is finalized. It would not see another standards revision for the next decade.
- n.b. ES4 does not exist. ES3.1, its competitor is what effectively became ES5 (aka the last bastion of var)

Popups, script-kiddies, and clipboard-driven-development
Microsoft wins the first Browser War, Netscape is reborn as Mozilla Phoenix (the precursor to Firefox)
During this time, the CSS standard also continues to languish, leaving many behaviours up to the implementation
XHTML gains popularity to avoid the tag soup problem
JavaScript’s monumental suckage contributes to Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash gaining ground
Douglas Crockford popularizes JSON

2006: John resig publishes jQuery and changes the game forever
2006: XmlHTTPRequest is introduced; AJAX becomes a thing
2008:
- Crockford publishes JavaScript: The Good Parts
- Google open-sources its V8 engine
- HTML5 is introduced
- Ruby on Rails explodes in popularity
2009
- ES5 (and with it, JSON) is finally standardized
- Node.js, based on V8 engine, frees JS from the browser
- Jeremy Ashkenas introduces Underscore and CoffeeScript
2010:
- NPM is introduced
- Backbone, Express, Angular kick off web framework proliferation
- MEAN stack is conceived as the hipster’s answer to LAMP

More frameworks: Ember, Knockout, Meteor, Wakanda, script.aculo.us
Browserify pioneers module bundling, uglify nukes whitespace, Grunt automates it all, and Gulp does it better
Webpack is introduced and does all of the above
Evan Czapliki introduces Elm shortly before Facebook introduces React (and Vue stumbles in drunk)
ES6, while not finalized, gains wide early adoption due to strong browser support and transpilers