What the fuck is Javascript?
Javascript is a programming language that helps make interactive web pages. Actually it’s not so much a programming language as it’s a scripting language. Actually its not confined to the browser anymore and does a lot of things. Ugh, it’s gonna be one of those definitions, isn’t it? Where shit goes all over the place… YUP!
Javascript first started out as a way to script interactive actions on a web page. Want some form fields to appear without reloading the page? Move an item from one side to another? Or create a complex application in a web page? These are all things that Javascript was created to achieve. It allowed programmers to script interactions that ran solely on your computer, not on their server. It’s sometimes referred to as a scripting language, and not a programming language, because the way it’s used. Honestly, that’s not that important, and if someone starts arguing with you about this, this is just the start of a boring, dull, monotonous conversation. Run away.
Later, a specific way to use Javascript on the server was introduced. This was called Node or NodeJS.
This allowed programmers who knew Javascript to now apply their craft to both the front and back end of websites (they could program in the browser and on the server, using the same language. Before NodeJS, this was not very common.)
Because browsers like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox have their own unique way of processing Javascript, sometimes you can write some Javascript that works in one browser but not another. To make things easier and more cross-browser compatible, libraries like jQuery or Prototype were introduced. They added a syntax on top of Javascript to remove the need to know the intracices of each browser. Later, to support newer programming methodologies and make complex programming solutions simpler for the average programmer, frameworks like React and Vue were introduced. Because of the many steps that frameworks and libraries remove a programmer from the underlying Javascript, its now possible for them to know a framework but know very little about Javascript.