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Comment by toddmorey | Hacker News Reader

Hear me out: the web / oss community could absolutely band together and rebrand JavaScript. Could be: LiveScript, WebScript, etc.

There would be good support and we could do it fairly swiftly. To hell with Oracle.

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We could also rebrand it as Js and it would be the funniest thing ever. Few things would make me happier than seeing Oracle being screwed by something that's technically correct, but clearly nonsense to every living human being.

The only reason it hasn’t had a name change is oracle hasn’t tried to protect the name. There needs to be a campaign to change the name.

I saw someone recommend the JS rebrand years ago, so I just started using it. Everyone knows what I mean when I mention "JS", I never have to explain.

Yes this seems to have become the best practice with all the JS Conf events and the logo showing JS. But frankly Oracle has always been a jerk and had miopic vision in things like this. I'm happy if someone also fights them on being a mindless jerk. They sued Google over Android using Java which was literally the best thing ever for Java. Java got learned by a whole new generation of developers (myself among those). Google at the time was also publishing the GWT Google Web Toolkit. Oracle would rather own a tombstone with written Java and JavaScript on it rather than set them free and find some other indirect ways to monetize. "If you love something, set them free" doesn't apply to Oracle, whose policies seem to show they have little love for development and software itself.

That's an interesting idea. Just to mention though:

LiveScript is a really great language that compiles to JavaScript.

https://livescript.net/

Wasn’t LiveScript JS’s original name?

According to Wikipedia, it was a server-side language, that NetScape adapted to client-side and renamed JavaScript a few days before go-live, to piggyback on Java's name and please Sun Microsystem shareholders.

Then people created node.js and went back to server-side JS. Life is cyclical.

No. It was the same language. Livewire was the server tech. Livewire implemented a <server> tag in LiveScript, but the majority of the scripting implementation was exactly the same. [0]

JS was originally named Mocha, but it was renamed to LiveScript as a tie-in with the server tech. However, after the deal with Sun Microsystems to put Java in the browser, it was almost scrapped before being saved by giving it the final name of JavaScript. [1]

To clarify, there was around a fifteen year gap between Livewire and Node.js, so things were not quite as streamlined as you implied.

[0]: https://dev.to/macargnelutti/server-side-javascript-a-decade...

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/node-up-and/97814493322...

I thought that was 'ecmascript' ??

It is, but everyone hates that and has no idea how to say it.

LOL - fair enough. Always sounded like a skin condition to me.. (I'm not a JS programmer though)

I'm so glad we're all in agreement regarding how to say "gif".

gift without t. ;)

Which was the original spelling of that word in Old English, which is why I've come to prefer the Old English pronunciation for gif: HYEEF.

I like NetScript, give a little callback to Netscape.

Hear me out: TypeScript

UntypeScript

TypelessScript

(Very fun to type when the "S" is lowercased.)

I also wouldn't complain about losing the confusion between Java and JavaScript.

Microsoft calls its variant "JScript".

That no longer exists in any meaningful form.

Can we call it LarryScript?

JarvisPact

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