Have you ever heard phrases like: “ECMAScript 2015 was something revolutionary.”, “Did you see what ES8 brought as a novelty?” or “You definitely need to see the updates in this version of ECMAScript.” I imagine someone has told you that at some point.
ECMAScript is indeed gaining more and more notoriety, and it is completely related to JavaScript. However, we may wonder what ECMAScript really is and what its relationship with JavaScript is.
This motivated us to write this article, where we will answer: after all, what is ECMAScript?
To answer this question, we will have to go back in time a bit and talk about the beginning of the JavaScript language.
Back to the Past
JavaScript or JS, as it is popularly known, was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich while he was working at Netscape. The original name of the language was Mocha, which was later changed to LiveScript before the language was actually named JavaScript.
In 1996, with the aim of standardizing the newly created language, Netspace decided to join JavaScript with ECMA International. ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association) is an association that carries out the specification or standardization of information systems.
With this merging, a new language standard was created, which was named by merging the words “ECMA” and “JavaScript”, resulting in the name “ECMAScript”. Since that year, the two technologies have gone hand in hand. In reality, ECMAScript is the official name of the technology. However, the name JavaScript “won the crowd”, which in this case is the developer community, and to this day the language is better known by that name.
Present Days
Whenever there is a new update of JavaScript features, it is released by ECMAScript, which can be abbreviated as ES. It is from this specification that acronyms like ES6, ES2015 or the most recent specification, ES2020 (which definitely deserves an article on our Blog), came.
Thus, in a few words, we can say that ECMAScript is a language specification, meaning it defines the standards for a programming language, and JavaScript is the implementation of those standards.
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