I can't be the only one who believes the name JavaScript should die in Peace. It was and still is the worst naming of any popular programming language in existence.
They switched for cynical marketing reasons, riding the "Java" hype, and to flaunt their partnership with Sun. Well, it did make some kind of sense at the time when the scope was much smaller. They had this rough idea of an interpreted lightweight companion to Java, back when lots of backends where build with Java and it was meant to be the frontend counterpart for some limited interactivity in the client. But they never got it properly integrated and they diverged very early.
JavaScript copied:
The name "Java", cynically chosen for marketing misdirection, not technical truth.
The word "prototype" from Self, but turned it into a quirky pseudo-class system. Instead of living objects delegating naturally, with multiple inheritance dynamically changeable at runtime, JavaScript glued on a weird constructor-function pattern that always confuses people, with constructors you have to call with new but can also uselessly call as normal functional foot-guns.
JavaScript missed:
The fluid, live object experience (JavaScript dev environments were never designed around exploration like Self’s Morphic).
The elegance of uniformity (JavaScript bolted on primitives, type coercions, and special cases everywhere).
The idea that the environment mattered as much as the language. Netscape didn’t ship with the kind of rich, reflective tools that made Self shine.
And most important of all: Self's simplicity! The original Self paper (Ungar & Smith, 1987, “Self: The Power of Simplicity”) was all about stripping away everything unnecessary until only a uniform, minimal object model remained. The title wasn’t ornamental, it was the thesis.
Simplicity. Uniformity. Minimal semantics. A clean consistent model you can hold in your head. Less semantic baggage frustrating JIT compiler optimization. Dynamic de-optimization (or pessimization as I like to call it).
Self proved that expressive power comes from radical simplicity.
JavaScript showed that market dominance comes from compromise (worse is better, the selfish gene).
JavaScript should be called SelfishScript because it claimed Self’s legacy but betrayed its central insight: that simplicity is not just aesthetic, it’s the whole design philosophy.
Thank you, Don for seeing and writing about this dimension.
We're all in on TypeScript now and I don't think they're teaching Java much in university or boot camps anymore so it doesn't matter much anyway. But when every other intern came in thinking programming WAS Java.... Not great. Having to never utter "JavaScript" again wasn't the primary motivation to move to TS, but it is a nice side benefit.
NB: But I had an intern say to me one day "did you know TypeScript is just JavaScript with types and a linter?" And I just smiled.
Anyone that stupid in 2025 is hopeless.
I can’t believe I’m having to explain this, but you can show people a car and a carpet and they’ll understand how they differ. But if you show them two different programming languages, most people won’t be able to tell the difference. Just like most people see Chinese and Japanese, Swedish and Finnish, Portuguese and Spanish, and don’t know enough to distinguish one from the other, despite them having different names. They’re just similar-looking symbols organised in different ways.
Sure. Now I'm guilty of all the anti-intellectualism we are seeing, and the propagandists get to walk free, but ok.
and
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That might just be the bubble you are in. Java is still one of the biggest languages used in corporations across the globes for anything backend related. If it is because it is a modern COBOL or because it actually is a stable language with a solid ecosystem might be a matter of some debate.
In the circles I navigate it is still heavily featured in various bootcamps.
Use only one variable that can go negative. The plaform keeps "only" the money on the losing side X2. For the lols.
In these days and age of hate and confrontation, whos knows it may work.
I do find that request outrageous, the true objective hidden, and I still don't grasp what the fuss is about anyway; in what way does it matter does Oracle own the name? Before being superseded by Python, wasn't JavaScript the world's most used language? Don't get me wrong, I'm no Oracle fan-boy, but why? And doesn't Oracle own Java as well? Sure, very different languages, but hard to say the same for the trademarked names, and Java is older. How about taking energy to do something else, something positive. 'JS' as somone said earlier, is pretty cool.
...I am 1000x more in favor of *.ws instead of "Michael Jackson" of *.mjs