Introduction
Sam Breed
QuickLeft
Core contributor for Backbone, author of Manning book Backbone in Action
How We Got Here
1995 Brendan Eich has 2 weeks to write a scripting language...
Standardised at EcmaScript (ES)
It's the most widely used programming language.
In 1995-2009 stagnation, very little progress was made
2003-2004 Ajax (xml became optional) - gmail, google maps, then twitter, facebook. No page reload
Performant applications, written with a lot of JavaScript. Had to make JavaScript faster, and browser vendors started competing to make faster js engines