What’s With That Name?

The name JavaScript is probably the most mistaken and misunderstood programming language name.

Is this language related to Java? Is it only the script form for Java? Is it only for writing scripts and not real programs?

The truth is, the name JavaScript is an artifact of marketing shenanigans. When Brendan Eich first conceived of the language, he code-named it Mocha. Internally at Netscape, the brand LiveScript was used. But when it came time to publicly name the language, “JavaScript” won the vote.

Why? Because this language was originally designed to appeal to an audience of mostly Java programmers, and because the word “script” was popular at the time to refer to lightweight programs. These lightweight “scripts” would be the first ones to embed inside of pages on this new thing called the web!

In other words, JavaScript was a marketing ploy to try to position this language as a palatable alternative to writing the heavier and more well-known Java of the day. It could just as easily have been called “WebJava,” for that matter.

There are some superficial resemblances between JavaScript’s code and Java code. Those similarities don’t particularly come from shared development, but from both languages targeting developers with assumed syntax expectations from C (and to an extent, C++).

For example, we use the { to begin a block of code and the } to end that block of code, just like C/C++ and Java. We also use the ; to punctuate the end of a statement.

In some ways, legal relationships run even deeper than the syntax. Oracle (via Sun), the company that still owns and runs Java, also owns the official trademark for the name “JavaScript” (via Netscape). This trademark is almost never enforced, and likely couldn’t be at this point.

For these reasons, some have suggested we use JS instead of JavaScript. That is a very common shorthand, if not a good candidate for an official language branding itself. Indeed, these books use JS almost exclusively to refer to the language.

Further distancing the language from the Oracle-owned trademark, the official name of the language specified by TC39 and formalized by the ECMA standards body is ECMAScript. And indeed, since 2016, the official language name has also been suffixed by the revision year; as of this writing, that’s ECMAScript 2019, or otherwise abbreviated ES2019.

In other words, the JavaScript/JS that runs in your browser or in Node.js, is an implementation of the ES2019 standard.

Whether you call it JavaScript, JS, ECMAScript, or ES2019, it’s most definitely not a variant of the Java language!

“Java is to JavaScript as ham is to hamster.” —Jeremy Keith, 2009