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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel like the idiotic marketing decision to name it "JavaScript" is never going to stop haunting us. The only ways out are for 1) Java to die (not going to happen), 2) JS to die (not going to happen), or 3) everybody to start calling it ECMAScript (probably not going to happen).

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It's easy. Call it ... CoffeeScript.

/ducks

"ECMAScript" sounds like some sort of horrible disease.

I agree; it is fitting.

Man, you should probably never say anything is fitting with a username like that. It's just too wide an opening.

Never is a long time. Java is in a strange, precarious situation already, and JavaScript won't last forever as the only option for client-side scripting. It'll slowly fade from relevance once there's a better option.

Java is in no way in a precarious situation! its one of the most popular enterprise language. Just because the cool kids these days think java is lame because they've got their ruby and node.js, doesn't mean java is dying at all. And i m saying this even tho i dislike oracle.

Yes, but java applets ARE in precarious situation and they rarely work at all.

The only time I have seen a java applet recently was on a website with ATARI emulator (I guess it still wasn't ported to JavaScript and/or Flash).

you are correct. I also have mentally struck applets from memory, and so to me they no longer exist ;)

...except that there are stock trading software that is written as java applets...sigh...

Javascript will fade from relevance right after plastic decomposes.

And cockroaches go extinct.

Plus humanity will eventually perish

I can be wrong, but I think remembering that Javascript is superset of ECMAScript (ActionScript being also based on ECMAScript, for example).

Just start calling it Mocha. That was to be the name originally, iirc, and it's heaps better.

I know one person who calls it ECMAScript. You probably know an awful lot about this person just by my telling you that one thing.

Except ECMAScript isn't correct either. ECMAScript is the name of the standard. Each browser implements a (different) subset of it. JavaScript used to be what Mozilla's implementation was called; Microsoft implemented JScript. ActionScript, the scripting language used in Adoble Flash, is also an implementation of ECMAScript.

Modern browsers implement ECMAScript 5; older browsers and AS 2.0 implement ECMAScript 3. ECMAScript 4 was scrapped, but AS 3.0 still implements it. Wikipedia, as usual, has all the gory details if anyone is actually interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

I actually read your comment as a strong case for ECMAScript being the most correct. Certainly more than the name of one particular implementation of the language standard.

Browsers all implement HTML differently, but we're happy to refer to it by the name of the standard.

> ECMAScript is the name of the standard. Each browser implements a (different) subset of it. JavaScript used to be what Mozilla's implementation was called; Microsoft implemented JScript.

mocha and livescript were the names at netscape. naming it javascript was a marketing strategy and a product of the sun-netscape cooperation. the ecmascript standard was born later, after the adoption of javascript/jscript.

>ECMAScript is the name of the standard. Each browser implements a (different) subset of it

Supersets, not subsets. In terms of syntax, there is essentially no difference between ECMAScript, JavaScript, and JScript. They're just different implementations of the same thing. In fact, the only reason JScript has a different name is because Microsoft didn't want to license the Java trademark from Sun.

ActionScript is a different animal; it's a superset of ECMAScript and has a lot of additional syntax features, like data type support.

In any case, to work across different browsers, JS code is usually written in the intersection of the ECMAScript superset languages implemented by those browsers. That intersection is ECMAScript.

Ah, is Mocha where the naming for CoffeeScript came from then? I like it too.

I assume the name for CoffeeScript came from it being calling JavaScript.

It was originally called LiveScript if I remember correctly, which was a beautiful and descriptive name. But then they renamed it to JavaScript for some reason.

Agreed, LiveScript was a very good name.

I'm curious who owns the LiveScript trademark, if anyone. If the Mozilla Foundation inherited it from Netscape/AOL, they should give it to ECMA. At this point, the association with Java is probably more of a negative.

(The most popular web browser can't even use the JavaScript trademark, due to totally unrelated events from 15 years ago. IMO a rebranding would still be feasible.)

I don't know if they have a trademark for it or not, but a quick Google shows that a CoffeeScript-like language with that name exists.

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