# JavaScript: the First 20 Years by Allen Wirfs-Brock and Brendan Eich

Original: https://swyx.io/js-20-years
Published: 2020-03-14

> A link to the 190 page history of JS by its original creator and the editor of ES6.

Allen Wirfs-Brock (editor of ES6) and Brendan Eich (you know what he did) have published [the definitive 20 year history of JavaScript](https://zenodo.org/record/3707008). It is a 190 page treatment for [The History of Programming Languages Conference](https://hopl4.sigplan.org/), which only occur once every 13-15 years (1978, 1993, 2007, 2020). [It took them 3 years to write the final manuscript.](http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/866)

Read it: https://zenodo.org/record/3707008

**If you have any interest in programming languages at all, you should read it.** Modern JavaScript, warts and all, is one of the biggest achievements of humanity, especially in the Information Age and the democratization of computing.

History won't stop here - HOPL-V in ~2035 might be more about visual programming languages and "[no code](https://webflow.com/blog/no-code-is-a-lie)" than it is traditional text editing. Every time programming gets easier, people get more infuriated, and yet the world keeps turning toward enabling more programmers. [The Future of Programming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4) is clear, even if we're never quite there yet.

That's it, that's pretty much all I want to blog today. I did write 1700 words on another blogpost, but that's currently in review.