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Wikipedia says: "Today, 'JavaScript' is a trademark of Oracle Corporation. It is used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape Communications and current entities such as the Mozilla Foundation." [1]

It's one of a long list of Java-related trademarks originally registered by Sun:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100528154600/http://www.sun.co...

Maybe Sun originally intended it to be the name of a Java-related product, and when Netscape invented JavaScript, they found out too late that the name had already been trademarked by Sun, so they licensed the trademark from Sun instead of changing the name? I'm just guessing. Does anyone know the real history?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Trademark




According to Crockford[0], Netscape called it LiveScript, originally. In their attempt to 'destroy Microsoft', they teamed up with Sun. One of Sun's original goals with Java was making it the client-side scripting language for the browser. However, Netscape had LiveScript. Apparently the negotiations almost broke down over this point.

In an enlightened moment, (probably) Marc Andreessen proposed renaming LiveScript to JavaScript (despite the fact that the languages have very little in common), and joy was had. Sun got the JavaScript trademark (and passed it on to Oracle), and Netscape got a perpetual exclusive license to use it.

When JavaScript was standardized to avoid Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Netscape refused to share its license, and so the official language was renamed to ECMAScript, after the standards body. When Sun was bought by Oracle, it also got the trademark, and presumably, Mozilla inherited the exclusive license from Netscape.

_____

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO1Wnu-xKoY#t=430


I was told by Robert Mathis that the name ECMAScript was picked as a draft name because they were unable to focus on standardizing the language due to all the fighting about the name. They figured the name was so awful that they would have to go back and change it before they finished the standard. Then they never got back around to changing it.


I thought the name "ECMAScript" was created out of necessity, presumably because Netscape had the exclusive license granted by Sun and using the name as part of the standard would affect that status?

They might as well have standardized it under the trademarked name, though. It seems that anything can be called JavaScript as long as it adheres to the spec (although strictly speaking Mozilla's JavaScript is versioned independently and the term "JavaScript" usually describes a superset of ECMAScript).


For anyone interested is JS history, this is the most comprehensive explanation of where JavaScript got its name I've heard (from Brendan Eichs POV)[1]. The podcast also deals with lots of other JS related history like what languages influenced it, the circumstances it was created under and the politics surrounding its conception. It's a great listen.

[1] http://javascriptjabber.com/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...


This needs to be a parent comment. The episode was one of the best JJ episodes and a great JS backgound piece. Highly recommended.


FWIW, submitted here the other week, w/o comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=BrendanEich


It's right there in the Wikipedia article you linked to:

Although it was developed under the name Mocha, the language was officially called LiveScript when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995, but it was renamed JavaScript when it was deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3.

The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language, and the choice has been characterized as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web programming language.

It was a marketing thing.


That's explains how LiveScript became Javascript but it doesn't answer the more interesting question: how did Netscape end up using a Sun trademark?


I don't really understand what remains unclear. The cited section explains that when Java got put into the browser, executives of both companies got together and decided that it would be good PR to rename LiveScript into JavaScript.

As Java was a trademark by Sun, they obviously had to register JavaSript as well (if they hadn't already done so - I did not look up the timeline, but it's not really relevant to the argument). Getting a license from Sun made it possible for Netscape to use the name without the Java trademark becoming diluted. Remember, if you don't defend your trademark, you'll lose it.


But Sun and Oracle have not demanded other users of Javascript obtain licenses.


True, but for a long time the only noteworthy "other user" was Microsoft and they kept calling it JScript for years even after they adopted the standard.

I'm not sure what exactly happened, but at some time after or during the lifetime of IE9 they stopped referring to their dialect of ECMAScript as "JScript" and began calling it "JavaScript". The most recent stuff I can find about JScript is about JScript.NET, which seems to be discontinued.

There's this issue filed on the Mozilla project back in 2000 that addresses this problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44841

As Google, Apple and Microsoft are openly using the JavaScript trademark (without marking it as a trademark) these days, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that it's okay to use the term "JavaScript" to refer to an ECMAScript implementation that is compatible with the original JavaScript language developed by Netscape. This would probably preclude Adobe's ActionScript and other "enhanced" flavours of ES (e.g. JSX? I've never seen Facebook refer to JSX as "JavaScript <something>" in a way that would imply JSX is simply JavaScript).


As I understand it from Crockford's retelling and what I've read on the web and heard in podcasts, Sun was concerned that LiveScript could be seen as a competitor to Java if both were present in the browser. Netscape wanted Java but wasn't willing to kill off their scripting language, so they agreed to name it JavaScript to make it sound like the two are related (and JS being "merely" a scripting language, people would still prefer Java for "real" programs).

Apparently LiveScript was also originally planned to be more Lisp-like but then they went with C-like syntax because that was more popular at the time (see Java). And the entire language was cobbled together in a ridiculously short time frame (something like a couple of weeks?) and intended to be "beginner friendly", which is where a lot of the language's quirks come from.

Considering the original JS already contained the syntax Crockford would eventually define as JSON, you could say they managed to create not one but two languages at once. Say what you will about JS being a good language or not, but you have to respect that achievement.

Considering JS only became ECMAScript because Netscape was scared of incompatible copycats, you could argue JS as it is today wouldn't exist without Microsoft, too. Strange world, eh?


> Considering the original JS already contained the syntax Crockford would eventually define as JSON, you could say they managed to create not one but two languages at once.

No, the original version of JavaScript did not include object literals and array literals - the two foundations of JSON.

Object and array literals were introduced in JavaScript 1.2:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_...

This is why old-school JavaScript programming had so much code like this:

  var obj = new Object;
  obj.prop = 'value';
and:

  var ary = new Array;
  ary[0] = 'first';
  ary[1] = 'second';


Right, and note to grand-parent post: Crockford was not at Netscape so he's not the eyewitness you're looking for.

I created JS1.2 and SpiderMonkey in fall 1996, as described in that JS Jabber podcast. Find this part in the transcript:

"I started to rewrite the VM, pay off technical debt, and I wrote what became SpiderMonkey. The original Mocha VM was not SpiderMonkey."

Object and array initialiser syntax was inspired by Python of the time (1996 would be Python 1.x, x around 6 IINM), but I made property names literals when spelled without quotes, as identifiers (same as the implicitly quoted name on the right of dot in member expressions).

In ES6 (in imitation of computed property access using square brackets) you can finally compute property names in object initialisers too:

var obj = { [nameExpr]: valueExpr };


Okay, so you didn't create the syntax JSON was based on until JS1.2? What I was getting at remains true then, though: you created JS and you created the object and array literal syntax that Crockford then "discovered" (to quote Crockford) and defined as JSON. Even if you didn't do it in the same couple of days it took you to create the original JS itself ;)


Amazing. There is a bunch of stuff to ask for about JS API...


The eventual compromise was that JavaScript would be a playground for experimentation and learning; whereas, Java was designed for hardcore computer science-types. If you wanted to add rich functionality to your site, you'd use JavaScript to call into a Java library, which did the heavy lifting. (This was paraphrased from Brendan Eich's The Origin of JavaScript: http://javascriptjabber.com/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...)

Of course, the web community embraced Shockwave/Flash over Java, and Java retreated to the server and mobile. Later, Steve Jobs was famously unimpressed with Macromedia/Adobe's forays into mobile and refused to ship a Flash interpretter in iOS. This led to the decline of Flash and a rising interest in creating a rich stack for client-side applications in JavaScript, bringing us to today's stack (canvas, WebGL, web audio, WebRTC, Ember/Angular/React, web components, pnacl/asm, etc.).


Gah. It’s such a weird naming choice. I still have peers confusing Java and Javascript...


It's sort of elegant, nicely rounds up the whole collection of weird choices in JavaScript's design.


They aren't "weird" design choices. Most of them are just plain bad design choices.


The more I use JavaScript (jquery), the more I fall in love with it!


I heard that if you try to run Java in a Javascript VM, it is silently coerced into almost the right JS code.


Most Java programs won't even parse.


So the Wikipedia says that the trademarked term "JavasScript", a word, is used under license for technology. That seems odd.




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