Brendan Eich

Creator of the JavaScript programming language

• Born: July 4, 1961
• Place of Birth: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Primary Company/Organization: Mozilla Corporation

Introduction

Perhaps Brendan Eich's most significant accomplishment was completing a specific assignment in about a week and a half. In that time, Eich, as a new employee at the Netscape Corporation, created a scripting language for presenting content that appeared on the Internet. Until then, everything that users saw on their web browsers was static, essentially pages they could open, read, or leave but with which they could not interact. Eich's invention, which came to be designated as JavaScript (now officially referred to as ECMA-262), allowed developers to create interactive web pages. Content was no longer merely passive but could be developed and presented to give an Internet user a wide range of options for interacting with and manipulating it. Since that time, Eich has been in the forefront of web browser development—leading the creation of the Firefox browser, for example—and the cause of open source software, supporting open and standardized development in order to allow anyone to bring content to the web and prevent single organizations from establishing monopolies.

Early Life

Brandon Eich was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1961. His undergraduate studies were at Santa Clara University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics. He then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a master's degree in computer science in 1986.

Eich's first job after graduating was at Silicon Graphics, a company that sold both hardware and software solutions. Eich was a programmer there for seven years. One of the significant factors surrounding Silicon Graphics (aside from its early commercial successes) was that it started the practice of making its code openly available to other developers. That practice seems to have informed much of Eich's development philosophy in subsequent years. Eich was part of the initial public offering (IPO) there in 1986, a circumstance that made him at least moderately wealthy.

After leaving Silicon Graphics, Eich took a position as a programmer at MicroUnity Systems, an engineering company specializing in data-streaming processors to support video and audio transmission.

Life's Work

Eich began working at Netscape in April 1995. He described his first assignment as developing a language that could be used to create dynamic content. At that time, the Internet did not have the technical capabilities to support interactivity, as it does now. Every page was static; those who had not created the page could read the content—access the page, scroll up and down the page, and leave it—but could not interact with the content in any way. JavaScript would make such interactivity possible, including the ability to enter data into fields, make calculations, and thus participate in e-commerce. Eich wrote JavaScript to make such dynamic content possible, and did so in ten days.

How he was to go about creating the dynamic qualities required a certain degree of decision making, keeping in mind what might be done in the future and who would do it. One school of thought was that something could be done with the Java programming language, which had existed for a few years and which Netscape was licensed to use. Java was, like its “rival” language C++, an object-oriented programming language, a concept deriving from object orientation as developed initially by Kristen Nygaard, with his Simula programming language. Java is extremely complex, although powerful. Using it outright or adopting it would necessarily restrict the community that could develop interactive content on the web to a relatively small group of developers. Eich decided that the tool to be created would be better if it were a scripting language and thus less complex than a full programming language such as Java. With that decision made, Eich developed what would be known eventually as JavaScript.

At first, his scripting language was known as Mocha, which was renamed LiveScript when it was released to the public as part of a Netscape release. It was finally christened JavaScript in a move that some thought was an effort to make the language more attractive by implying that it was part of, or derived from, the programming language Java. Eich has been clear that the name was determined by Netscape management.

JavaScript was successful and came to be adopted by everyone. Among those who used it for development was Netscape's main rival, Microsoft, for use in its Internet Explorer. JavaScript not only was widely accepted by developers but also was eventually standardized through Ecma International (a standards organization that has existed since 1961). The reason for moving the code to Ecma in 1996 was not only to guarantee standardization but also to prevent organizations such as Microsoft from taking the language over and creating a semiproprietary language that would defeat the open systems concept Netscape was embracing. JavaScript is still widely known by that name, but its technical nomenclature is ECMAScript or ECMA-262.

JavaScript has not been without its competitors, however. Google developed a tool for its Chrome browser, named Dart, which it claimed would eventually replace JavaScript. Eich was extremely outspoken in his criticism of Dart. Both he and others noted that major browsers Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari had no plans to adopt Dart. Google itself announced in 2015 that it would not integrate Dart as a replacement for JavaScript for Chrome. JavaScript will remain the main tool for web development for anything developed for Google Chrome.

When the company offered its IPO (Eich's second) in 1995, Eich found himself well off. In an interview the following year with The New York Times, Eich was happy with the money he had made but was hinting of someday establishing his own company.

After its initial success, when it seemed that the browser on every computer connected to the Internet was Netscape Communicator, a dramatic switch occurred. Netscape became engaged in a battle with Microsoft that it would eventually lose in what came to be known as the first browser war. The result was the eventual disappearance of the Netscape browser. Through all of these developments, however, Eich remained at Netscape, continuing development projects. In 1998, he was named the lead architect for the Mozilla project.

As lead architect, Eich was involved in the open software approach that Netscape was taking. Open sourcing allowed any independent developer with a sufficient skill set to be able to develop products that would operate seamlessly with the host application (such as the Netscape browser). The open concept, which has gained in popularity, is based on more than making the base source code available. It also requires free distribution of software, providing source code with the program, allowing work to be derived from the code, technology neutrality, and a commitment to placing no restrictions on other software. The importance of this approach and the definition of open sourcing would be critical in the coming years, informing the technical and business approaches of the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, both heavily influenced by Eich's vision.

In 2003, Eich, still with Netscape although it had been acquired by America Online, helped to found and become a board member for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization that—although it possesses a full-time staff—relies on skilled unpaid volunteers to enhance its products, a merging of collaboration and the opportunities afforded by open systems.

Two years later, the foundation created the Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit organization that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation. Eich was named as the company's chief technology officer (CTO). He became the CEO of Mozilla in 2014 but resigned soon after because of a political controversy. From there, he cofounded the company Brave Software, which launched the first version of its Brave browser, which was designed to block ads, in 2016.

Personal Life

Eich is married and has five children. Starting in the 1970s, Eich began studying the piano and is an accomplished musician at home, in the classical reportoire.

In 1998, Eich was named as Web Innovator of the Year (the first to receive the award) for his work with Netscape and his invention of JavaScript. He joined the advisory board of Ajax.org (developers of a collaborative online development environment, Cloud9 IDE) in 2011.

In 2012, controversy followed Eich when the Los Angeles Times reported that he had donated $1,000 to support the passage of Proposition 8, an initiative to ban gay marriage in California, which passed in November 2008.

Bibliography

Booth, David R. Peer Participation and Software: What Mozilla Has to Teach Government. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Clark, Jim. Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-up That Took on Microsoft. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. Print.

Eich, Brendan. “Part Artist, Part Hacker and a Full-Time Programmer.” Interview by Steve Lohr. New York Times 9 Sept. 1996: n. pag. Print.

Lohr, Steve. “BITS: Mozilla Sets Its Sights on Aps.” New York Times 27 Feb. 2012: n. pag. Print.

Lohr, Steve, and John Markoff. “In the Battle of the Browsers ‘04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft.” New York Times 15 Nov. 2004: n. pag. Print.

Seibel, Peter. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. New York: Apress, 2009. Print.

Severance, Charles. “JavaScript: Designing a Language in 10 Days.” Computer 45.2 (2012): 7–8. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Aug. 2012.

Spinello, R. A. “Competing Fairly in the New Economy: Lessons from the Browser Wars.” Journal of Business Ethics 57.4 (2005): 343–61. Print.

Sullivan, Mark. "The Web Pioneer Taking On Google with a Private Browser and a Loyalty Club." Fast Company, 17 Apr. 2019, www.fastcompany.com/90332739/this-web-pioneer-is-taking-on-google-with-a-privacy-first-browser. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.

Tyson, Matthew. "Brendan Eich: Don't Blame Cookies and JavaScript." InfoWorld, 19 Sept. 2022, www.infoworld.com/article/3673292/brendan-eich-dont-blame-cookies-and-javascript.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.