This article will clear your doubts about JavaScript. Is JavaScript part of Java programming language? I believe many programmers still have a subconscious feeling that it is.

This is mainly due to the name it was given.

JavaScript was created in 1995. It was formerly known as LiveScript. Back then, Java programming language was very popular. To attract Java developer to use LiveScript, LiveScript was re-branded as JavaScript in 1996!

Thus, JavaScript and Java are completely different programming languages!

In 1997, JavaScript was submitted to Ecma International. Ecma International publishes a vast global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Consumer Electronics (CE) standards.

Ecma International released the first version of JavaScript standard called ES1 (ECMAScript 1).

In 2009, ES5 (ECMAScript 5) was released with many new features. In June 2015, there was a huge upgrade to ES5 which benefited the entire JavaScript community. The ES6, or officially called ES2015 (ECMAScript 2015), was released.

After 2015, JavaScript was updated and released every year with incremental updates. This ensured the developers are up-to-date on yearly basis.

As of today, you will find JavaScript standards as ES7 (for 2016), ES8 (for 2017) and so on.

So which JavaScript standard should you use? ES5 is the foundation and it is able to support all browsers. For ES6, ES7, ES8, it is not supported in older browsers. However, by using transpiling and polyfiling. methods, you can convert ES6, ES7, ES8 to ES5.

You can find ES6 compatibility table here: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

The future versions of ES are called ESNext. These includes ES9 (for 2018) and ES10 (for 2019).

For the beginners, I would recommend you to start learning from ES5 and build your foundation from there.

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