JavaScript: A Name That Confused a Generation
JavaScript is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world — yet its very name has caused decades of confusion. This article tells the little-known story of how a marketing decision shaped the way an entire generation misunderstood the language, its purpose, and its programming model.
The language we now call JavaScript was initially developed in 1995 under the internal name Mocha, then briefly released as LiveScript. Only weeks before its inclusion in Netscape Navigator, it was renamed JavaScript.
This renaming was not a technical decision. It was a marketing move.
At the time, Java — backed by Sun Microsystems — was receiving intense media attention. Netscape had entered a strategic partnership with Sun, and attaching the word Java to a new browser language promised instant visibility and perceived legitimacy.
The result was a durable misunderstanding.
JavaScript shares almost nothing with Java beyond a superficial C-like syntax. Java is class-based, statically typed, and designed around compilation to a virtual machine. JavaScript is dynamically typed, prototype-based, and built around delegation and runtime behavior. The shared name suggested a relationship that did not exist.
This mismatch had long-term consequences:
- The intended audience misunderstood the language’s actual object model.
- Developers approached it with class-based expectations.
- Teaching materials reinforced incorrect analogies.
- The prototype system was obscured, ignored, or actively worked around.
Over the following years, the ECMA standardization process undertook a considerable effort to stabilize, formalize, and evolve the language. Much of this work was necessary and valuable: interoperability, specification rigor, and long-term viability depended on it.
However, part of this effort was also driven by persistent pressure to align JavaScript with the class-based mental model developers expected, rather than the one the language actually implemented.
This culminated, years later, in the introduction of a class-based syntax — not as a new semantic foundation, but as a cosmetic layer over the existing prototype system. The underlying model did not change; only its presentation did.
In effect, the language finally adopted the appearance of the model it had been mistakenly assumed to have from the beginning.
In hindsight, this episode illustrates a recurring pattern in software history: marketing did not understand who the real audience was, the audience did not understand the language’s real objective, and standardization ultimately accommodated the misunderstanding rather than correcting it.
JavaScript spread rapidly thanks to its name — and matured thanks to standardization — but at the cost of decades of conceptual confusion about what the language truly is.
Alexandre Vialle