How JavaScript Happened: A Short History of Programming Languages by Mark Rendle

JavaScript was originally created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995 as a quick demo, initially based on Scheme running in the browser

The iterator variable ‘i’ commonly used in loops comes from FORTRAN, which established this convention that continues today

ALGOL introduced many fundamental programming concepts like block structure, if/then/else statements, and the concept of null

Simula (1962) was actually the first object-oriented programming language, not Smalltalk, introducing classes, inheritance and polymorphism

Many core JavaScript features trace back to earlier languages:

• Dynamic typing from APL
• Prototypal inheritance from Self
• First-class functions from LISP
• Curly braces from BCPL
• async/await originally from C#

FORTRAN established the 80-character line length limit due to punch card constraints, which influenced code formatting standards for decades

The C programming language gave us the “C-style” syntax that influenced Java, JavaScript, C# and many modern languages

COBOL and BASIC didn’t contribute significant lasting innovations to programming language development

Many fundamental programming concepts we use today were established very early - some dating back to 1955 with FORTRAN

JavaScript continues to evolve and adopt features from other languages while maintaining compatibility with its early design decisions