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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone justify the connection between Java and JavaScript? They seem like very different languages to me.

Nothing if you refer to one of the other referenced graph [1]. In this graph it's a derivative of C and C++. IMHO, regarding JS, nobody can affirm from which languages it is a derivative unless Brendan Eich himself.

By the way, such a graph does not give much information about the influences that make a language evolves. It's like saying English is a fork of German and since the split neither of these languages have been influenced by others (e.g. Lambdas have been added to Java only because one of the mainteners had a new idea one morning while taking its shower)

[1] http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/Computer...

IIRC, the syntax for JS was redesigned hurriedly to look like Java because at the time Java was hyped as the one true language for everything web, including front-end apps (applets). Definitely the name was chosen for that reason.

If you add static types to js and create typescript you all of a sudden have something that looks a lot like c# and java ... don’t you think?

And if you add Lambdas to Java you all of a sudden have something that looks a lot like JavaScript... Don't you think?

To me the big different between js and java is the static type system - ignore that the connection between the two is obvious.

I didn't redesign JS syntax at all, it was always C family syntax with Java keywords reserved and a few non-C keywords even used. I never had an s-expr language at first and redid the syntax. Anyone who says so is misinformed.

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