> As I’ve often said, and as others at Netscape can confirm, I was recruited to Netscape with the promise of “doing Scheme” in the browser. At least client engineering management including Tom Paquin, Michael Toy, and Rick Schell, along with some guy named Marc Andreessen, were convinced that Netscape should embed a programming language, in source form, in HTML. So it was hardly a case of me selling a “pointy-haired boss” — more the reverse.

> Whether that language should be Scheme was an open question, but Scheme was the bait I went for in joining Netscape. Previously, at SGI, Nick Thompson had turned me on to SICP.

Source: https://brendaneich.com/tag/javascript/

"As I’ve often said, and as others at Netscape can confirm, I was recruited to Netscape with the promise of “doing Scheme” in the browser."[0]

I guess what you're confusing is that he disclaims that it is inspired mostly on scheme:

"I still think of it as a quickie love-child of C and Self."[0]

[0]https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

Just to be clear the prototypal inheritance came from Scheme, but the funcational aspects of JavaScript came from Lisp. Scheme's influence on JavaScript was, at the time, indeed an open question. On the other hand they absolutely told Eich not to do anything that resembled Lisp. JavaScript was to be Java's little brother and it had to look like and mostly act like its big brother. Eich made it work like Lisp anyways thinking they wouldn't notice given the incredibly short development window and the fact that as long as there was an inheritance concept it would satisfy the "feel enough like Java bit".

Of course nobody noticed JavaScript had influences from Lisp. It was buggy when it initially rolled out and it took a couple of revisions before nested functions were supported. This is backed up by David Flanagan's book "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide", which doesn't mention nested functions and closures until its third edition in 1998, because JavaScript didn't have closures until then. Whether it was a missing feature or due to a defect is something you would have to ask Eich directly.

Brendan recently wished John Carmack best of luck with landing lisp in VR with his use of Racket for Oculus. Pretty cool seeing great engineers cheer each other on with common goals. Also interesting to see John, someone steeped in and super productive in many C variants, invest heavily in a functional language.

I don't know when the multiple times were. The language was designed in the span of a week or two if I remember correctly. That's a damn good job for language development given the constraints.

Watch Dave C.'s talk on the history of programing as it shines more light on the situation.