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WHO IS BRENDAN EICH, THE FATHER OF JAVASCRIPT
“Part Artist, Part Hacker And Full-Time Programmer”, as the New York Times defines Brendan Eich. Born on July 4, 1961 in Pittsburgh, Maryland, Brendan Eich graduated from the University of Santa Clara, California, in mathematics and computer science. In 1985 he also received a master degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduation he started his career at Silicon Graphics, where he remained for seven years, working on the operating system and the network code. The next three years he worked for MicroUnity Systems Engineering, writing code for microkernel and for DSP (digital signaling processors).
THE BIRTH OF JAVASCRIPT
1995 is the turning point in Eich's career, as it has been for many of the Big Coders we talked about in our blog: the incredible diffusion and development of the World Wide Web pushed companies to work hard for develop codes and languages in order to allow their products to emerge and become focal points of the new Network. Also in 1995, the Netscape Communications Corporations, to which belongs the first successful graphic web browser in the history of computing, the famous Netscape Navigator, believed the browser / server combination as a new type of distributed operating system and not just as a single application.
For 1995, in fact, browsers already had the potential to allow developers to reach users of any platform, such as Windows, Mac or Linux, but the missing ingredient was a programming language. What Netscape really wanted was a language that could complete Java and that even beginner programmers could use, just like Microsoft's Visual Basic. For the functionalities to which they aspired, however, HTML was not enough, and so it was decided to take a more difficult path: to create an ad hoc language.
Brendan Eich, just 34 years old, was hired in April 1995 by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was initially commissioned to insert Scheme, a functional programming language invented in the 1970s and widespread above all academically, in the Netscape browser. At the end, however, Brendan's leaders agreed on the need for a language whose syntax was more similar to Java, and Brendan was then commissioned to create a new programming language: in just 10 days Brendan created one with the Scheme functionality, Self's typical object orientation and Java-like syntax (do you know the story of James Gosling, the inventor of Java? No ?? read it here!). The first version was called Mocha, then renamed LiveScript and finally JavaScript.
One of the main reasons why Netscape Communication Corporation hired Brendan was that Brendan was not at all new to the creation of programming languages, indeed, during his studies and then in the period spent at Silicon Graphics, he created some of them "even just for fun".
The new language created by Brendan Eich has become one of the most used languages by client-side Web programmers, with over 10 million developers by 2018, making it the most used language in the world. Used for the creation of interactive dynamic effects on websites and web applications, JavaScript allows developers to create script functions that can be activated by actions triggered on the page by the user himself, such as mouse movement, use of the keyboard, the loading the page, etc. Recently, moreover, JavaScript has been extended also to the server side.
The success that JavaScript had from the start surprised Brendan, but it did not shock him: “What made JavaScript so powerful, with all the warts and rush job properties, was that it was directly connected to all the things in the browser that average web developers wanted to use”. Often in interviews, Brendan Eich says that if he could go back to those ten fateful days would not ask for more time to complete the language, as many of us might think; instead he says that he would choose more carefully which suggestions to follow and which to abandon.
THE POST-JAVASCRIPT
In the years following the creation of Javascript, Brendan Eich continued to follow closely the development of SpiderMokey, the specific implementation of JavaScript in Netscape Navigator. In early 1998, Eich and Jamie Zawinski founded the Mozilla project, creating the mozilla.org site, which was initially intended to manage open-source contributions to Netscape's source code.
After AOL closed the Netscape browser unit (purchased in 1999) in 2003, Eich contributed to the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, where he held various roles, including lead technologist, member of the board of directors and later chief technical officer of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation, destined to be the profit-making arm of the Mozilla Foundation. In addition, Eich still owned the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, its JavaScript engine, until 2011.
On March 24, 2014, Eich becomes CEO of Mozilla Corporation, although there was a disagreement on the board of directors regarding his appointment. The CEO experience is rather short, and Eich resigned after the news of his contribution of a thousand dollars to the campaign for the California Proposition 8 bill, which asked to prohibit same-sex marriage in California, position from which the Mozilla Corporation immediately departed.
On May 28, 2015, Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy found Brave Software, an Internet browser platform company of which Eich is the current CEO, who released a developer version of his Brave web browser in January 2016.
Brave, says Eich, "is for all people who care about their privacy and the speed of surfing the Web": Brave in fact blocks ads and trackers and includes a cryptocurrency micro-payment system, to offer users the choice between viewing selected ads or paid websites so you don't see them.
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