I actually used this back in the day: once at university, and then again for a telecoms project in my first job.

But it doesn't mean there's much commonality - beyond superficially C-like syntax - between the languages, and certainly not between their "standard libraries" (aka the browser APIs in JavaScript's case).

Eh, JavaScript wasn't the originally chosen name, it was LiveScript by Eich. I've never seen a justification for the name from anyone in the know, other than Eich's musing that Netscape wanted the "cool" factor. That "cool" factor was also why the original task of embedding scheme into the browser turned into a more C/Java-esque flavor.

I would tell them they are wasting your time by not offering you fitting jobs. It's on them to know what they are looking for, not on you

To be frank this is a service to you. No company you want to work at has a recruiter that doesn't understand the difference (a fully AI recruiter would be better than this experience).

For normal people Java is a short way to say JavaScript.

TypeScript is a really decent language though, I wouldn't feel happier or more productive using Fortran or whatever. Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs, and it's easy to write functional code with correct-by-construction data. If you need some super optimized code then sure that's what WASM is for but that's not the problem with most web apps, the usual problem is bad design, but then choice of language doesn't save you. Sure TS has some annoying legacy stuff from JS but every language has cruft, and with strict linting you can eliminate it.

It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.

I love WASM, I do appreciate that it is slowly but reasonably growing into its final destination.

TFA says Microsoft offered the JScript trademark to be used in place of JavaScript, so there’s some indication of willingness to give up a trademark.

If browser makers offered to put it in the browser if the name is freed, I bet they could be convinced. The main problem right now, is that there isn't a major push to add TS to the browser.

If you can find the clip on you tube where he says it, it's even funnier. But sadly also true.

https://simonwillison.net

Heh - it depends on the "Project Damagers" you have to work with...

No runtime type safety bites people often and in unexpected ways. It should just be standardized.

So? If supported natively by the browser the browser could compile it on download.

You'll still get all the strong typing without have to wait for it to run.

For example an error in a little used branch would cause an error before the branch even runs.

That’s always been my favorite proposal. WebScript is short and to the point.

Happenstance, but that press release you linked to was December 4, 1995 - exactly 30 years ago today!

The language now called Groovy would have been JavaScript if the name wasn’t already taken.

> Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems,

Haha, or because it froze the whole browser for a few seconds upon loading. Unlike Macromedia Flash by the way.

The story is somewhat more complicated than that and not amenable to a simple summary, because there are multiple entities with multiple motivations involved. Keeping it simple, the reason why the press release babbles about that is that that is corporate Netscape talking at the height of the Java throat-forcing era. Those of you who were not around for it have no equivalent experience for how Java was being marketed back then because no language since then has been backed by such a marketing budget, but Java was being crammed down our throats whether you like it or not. Not entirely unlike AI is today, only programmers were being even more targeted and could have been seeing more inflation-adjusted-dollar-per-person spend since the set of people being targeted is so much smaller than AI's "everyone in the world" target.

This cramming did not have any regard for whether Java was a good solution for a given problem, or indeed whether the Java of that era could solve the problem at all. It did not matter. Java was Good. Good was Java. Java was the Future. Java was the Entire Future. Get on board or get left behind. It was made all the more infuriating for the fact that the Java of this time period was not very good at all; terrible startup, terrible performance, absolutely shitty support for anything we take for granted nowadays like GUIs or basic data structure libraries, garbage APIs shoved out the door as quickly as possible so they could check the bullet point that "yes, java did that" as quickly as possible, like Java's copy-of-a-copy of the C++ streaming (which are themselves widely considered a terrible idea and an antipattern today!).

I'm not even saying this because I'm emotional or angry about it or hate Java today. Java today is only syntactically similar to Java in the 90s. It hardly resembles it in any other way. Despite the emotional tone of some of what I'm saying, I mean this as descriptive. Things really were getting shoveled out the door with a minimum of design and no real-world testing so that the Java that they were spending so much marketing money on could be said that yes! It connected to this database! Yes! It speaks XML! Yes! It has a cross-platform GUI! These things all barely work as long as you don't subject them to a stiff breeze, but the bullet point is checked!

The original plan was for Java to simply be the browser language, because that's what the suits wanted, because probably that's what the suits were being paid to want. Anyone can look around today and see that that is not a great match for a browser language, and a scripting language was a better idea especially for the browser in the beginning. However, the suits did not care.

The engineers did, and they were able to sneak a scripting language into the browser by virtue of putting "Java" in the name, which was enough to fool the suits. If my previous emotional text still has not impressed upon you the nature of this time, consider what this indicates from a post-modern analysis perspective. Look at Java. Look at Javascript. Observe their differences. Observe how one strains to even draw any similarities between them beyond the basics you get from being a computer language. Yet simply slapping the word "Java" on the language was enough to get the suits to not ask any more questions until much, much later. That's how crazy the Java push was at the time... you could slip an entirely different scripting language in under the cover of the incredible propaganda for Java.

So while the press release will say that it was intended to glue Java applets, because that's what the suits needed to hear at that point, it really wasn't the case and frankly it was never even all that great at it. Turns out bridging the world between Java and Javascript is actually pretty difficult; in 2025 we pay the requisite memory and CPU costs without so much as blinking but in an era of 32 or 64 MEGAbyte RAM profiles it was nowhere near as casual. The reality is that what Javascript was intended to be by the actual people who created it and essentially snuck it in under the noses of the suits is exactly what it is today: The browser scripting language. I think you also had some problems like we still have today with WASM trying to move larger things back and forth between the environments, only much, much more so.

We all wish it had more than a week to cook before being shoved out the door itself, but it was still immensely more successful than Java ever could have been.

(Finally, despite my repeated use of the term "suits", I'm not a radical anti-business hippie hacker type. I understand where my paycheck comes from. I'm not intrinsically against "business people". I use the term perjoratively even so. The dotcom era was full of bullshit and they earned that perjorative fair and square.)

Well for the majority of us here, Sun acquisition by Oracle was just few years ago. It was a canon event and we still think about it hehe

You should consider reading the article.

> But ultimately it is up to a judge to decide. Right?

I think we are getting a rude awakening about what is legal versus what is actually right are not always the same thing. There are some the horrible, horrible things here and the laws need updating, as opposed to us simply saying this is for a judge to decide and there is nothing else we can do.

I am ok with ditching the JavaScript name. I understand this cuts the problem entirely. However, there are other problems we have that we can't bypass so easily.

We need copyright terms to be much reduced. We need CFAA fully repealed and not replaced by anything. We need to abolish software patents. There is a lot we need to do that will likely take a century to accomplish and that's likely being too optimistic.

What we can't do is leave everything up to the judges because clearly even if we get a favorable ruling today, the precedent can be removed by another stroke of a pen.

Would be nice if Microsoft hadn't taken JScript

Or how about just "J", like "C", and "B" before it.

soulJaboy Script

How is it outdated?

JabbaScript

Yes! I said this same thing in a separate comment! It sounds like Eczema Script

Yeah definitely cultural. IME it's called JS only in chat as a shortcut. IRL people say "javascript"

That’s actually the perfect name for it!

Flaky when under pressure? Irritating results? Sites look and feel better without it?

Sounds appropriate to me.

It is pronounced like that, typically

I've only ever heard it pronounced as "EcmaScript" not E-C-M-A Script"