The forgotten developer who saved JavaScript...
Fireship
May 29, 2026
JavaScript’s evolution from a ridiculed, 10-day experiment into the world’s most popular language was driven by Jeremy Ashkenas. Through Underscore.js, CoffeeScript, and Backbone.js, Ashkenas provided the essential standard library, syntax improvements, and architectural patterns that forced the language to mature, eventually forcing the official ECMAScript standards to adopt his innovations.
Key insight: Modern JavaScript features like arrow functions, classes, and destructuring were not original to the language; they were first popularized by CoffeeScript, which Ashkenas created to bypass the slow pace of browser standards committees.
