Random nerd note: The history is slightly wrong. Netscape had their own "interactive script" language at the time Sun started talking about Java and somehow got the front page of the Mercury news when they announced it in March of 1995. At the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt Germany everyone was talking about it and I was roped into giving a session on it during lunch break (which then had to be stopped because no one was going to the keynote by SGI :-)). Everyone one there was excited and saying "forget everything, this is the future." So, Netscape wanted to incorporate it into Netscape Navigator (their browser) but they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language. They wanted to call it JavaScript to ride the coattails of the Java excitement and Sun legal only agreed to let them do that if they would promise to ship Java in their browser when it hit 1.0 (which it did in September of that year).
So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.
So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.
I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun. Here's a picture of most of us at the time : http://mcmanis.com/chuck/original_java_team.html (this was originally in the HotJava distribution Sun gave out when the source was released.)
I was doing security, networking, crypto, and a bit of Solaris support along with others. Basically I was a 'systems' guy vs a 'language' guy like James, Arthur and Richard. We all participated in the integration with Navigator and had weekly meetings with Netscape while we were doing that.
They now have GoFundMe where they are soliciting donations for a discovery phase of a <strike>patent</strike> trademark cancellation request.
They have just 50k USD out of 200k USD they are raising. (No idea if that's appropriate; from the outside, it seems like a lot of money, but also they are fighting Oracle which has unlimited money, so, yeah)
For some reason it's not linked in the page itself.
Not to nit-pic, but it's a Trademark cancellation - not a patent. The confusion probably came from the fact it's before the US Patent and Trademark Office.
to nitpick, short of holding evidence of a literal internal memoradum stating it, $100,000 or $100,000,000,000 won't be able to prove that a company has no intention to resume the use of a trademark at some point. the entire affair is pointless fantasy
Wouldn't Oracle's use of the Java trademark be problematic in a trademark cancellation request? We're talking about two very similar names for identical product types (i.e. programming languages). Indeed the similarity was originally intended to imply an association. I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle's sole interest in the trademark is due to its similarity and history.
Oracle's sole interest is extracting money from its assets through whatever tactics are most effective, regardless of technical merit (not specific to JavaScript I guess though)
Side question: can the CEO or sole proprietor of a corporation/small business/ nonprofit litigate pro se on behalf of their company? I know you can do this when acting as an individual, but if a business is too poor to afford representation, can they "wing it" as a last ditch measure? Or is it checkmate at that point?
If possible, I would like to see the good guys in these cases go down fighting, and try to delay proceedings and waste as much money of their well-funded opponents as possible.
I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript, because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). I wish Oracle started suing people to force everyone to use the better name.
> because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway).
Probably if we were in the early 2000s this could have been a battle worth fighting. But considering we're in 2025 and probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point, even when you're deep in enterprise-land, I'm not sure it'd be less confusing.
Anyways, you're about two decades too late to this discussion :/
> probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point
All the same, I probably get as many calls from recruiters to fill Java positions as I do JS positions. I've never used the former, and explaining it is always awkward!
To be frank this is a service to you. No company you want to work at has a recruiter that doesn't understand the difference (a fully AI recruiter would be better than this experience).
I think normal people are actually aware what JS and HTML are. Most people are more tech savvy than we give them credit - or credit they might give themselves.
I think normal people don't know the difference between google and a web browser. Even many of the ones that used to understand the difference forgot some time after their primary computing device became a locked down phone.
Can confirm. My wife (who is a very normal person) was using bing the other day and when I pointed it out she asked me what I was talking about and pointed to the chrome browser icon in the taskbar. The level of confusion is almost unfathomable to us.
Yes for normal teenagers in the early 2000s or so (MySpace encouraged experimentation and there were many sites where people would upload copy/pastable javascript snippets for their sites), outside of that group I'm not so sure.
sometimes we make silly errors for years or decades and no one spots them. if you've been saying you hate java bloat/frameworks/whatever and meaning you hate javascript bloat/frameworks/whatever, people would probably agree with both. no one would be the wiser.
Aside from the "Java is cool, name everything Java" in the early days - there was scripting between the browser and the applet using a language named JavaScript.
I actually used this back in the day: once at university, and then again for a telecoms project in my first job.
But it doesn't mean there's much commonality - beyond superficially C-like syntax - between the languages, and certainly not between their "standard libraries" (aka the browser APIs in JavaScript's case).
Eh, JavaScript wasn't the originally chosen name, it was LiveScript by Eich. I've never seen a justification for the name from anyone in the know, other than Eich's musing that Netscape wanted the "cool" factor. That "cool" factor was also why the original task of embedding scheme into the browser turned into a more C/Java-esque flavor.
> Java applets can invoke JavaScript functions present in the same web page as the applet. The LiveConnect Specification describes details about how JavaScript code communicates with Java code.
> LiveConnect is a feature of web browsers which allows Java applets to communicate with the JavaScript engine in the browser, and JavaScript on the web page to interact with applets. The LiveConnect concept originated in the Netscape web browser, and to this date, Mozilla and Firefox browsers have had the most complete support for LiveConnect features. It has, however, been possible to call between JavaScript and Java in some fashion on all web browsers for a number of years.
> Improved Java/JavaScript communication. The bridge between the JavaScript engine in the web browser and the Java programming language has been completely reimplemented. The new implementation is backward-compatible and features improved reliability, performance and cross-browser portability, for both Java calling JavaScript as well as JavaScript calling Java. Formerly Mozilla-specific "LiveConnect" functionality, such as the ability to call static Java methods, instantiate new Java objects and reference third-party packages from JavaScript, is now available in all browsers.
The "LiveConnect" relating to the original LiveScript maybe? And that LiveConnect was a Netscape/Mozilla driven thing.
My point was more one of "JavaScript was the glue between applets and the HTML page itself early in the development of the language."
Renaming LiveScript to JavaScript and promoting the LiveConnect functionality wasn't an unreasonable thing at the time.
Sun was pushing it as a way to script Java applets. Might have even worked out if LiveConnect (the interface layer between Java and JS) wasn't such buggy trash.
And if Java wouldn't have been such a big beast. The startup times for the runtime and memory usage were way too high for a good experience for most user's machines.
The original design for <script> was supposed to be extensible, and IE of all things actually allowed any "active scripting" engine to be used, so for a brief time you had things like Perl and Tcl as scripting languages, but only on Windows.
We'll probably get there again with wasm, eventually. But it's taking a very long time.
Yeah, I agree with you. I remember being annoyed by the name in 1999 because, as you say, JavaScripts's not got much to do with Java other than both languages being superficially C-like... but I don't see it as being confusing for more time than it takes to read introductory tutorials for each language.
I am going to sound crazy, but, if Microsoft would free up TypeScript and every browser added native TypeScript features to JavaScript… and then we all just started calling it TypeScript. Maybe? Then you would see native ts files. Oracle will never give up JS. The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.
For years we said bring something sane to browsers instead of trying to salvage js.
At this point, though, why don't they just implement DOM bindings in wasm and make internets a better place overnight?
TypeScript is a really decent language though, I wouldn't feel happier or more productive using Fortran or whatever. Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs, and it's easy to write functional code with correct-by-construction data. If you need some super optimized code then sure that's what WASM is for but that's not the problem with most web apps, the usual problem is bad design, but then choice of language doesn't save you. Sure TS has some annoying legacy stuff from JS but every language has cruft, and with strict linting you can eliminate it.
It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.
> It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.
This argument is slightly backwards. This is essentially the argument used for "javascript in the backend" and "let's package the whole browser as application runtime so we can use javascript". The core of the argument is that javascript is ipso facto the best language/runtime to write any code in, including refactoring existing codebases. Bringing javascript out of the browser also means you have to write bindings for javascript and recreate the existing ecosystems anyway.
Even if you approach this from "single codebase across runtimes" angle, the conclusion to bridge the gap between browsers and languages with existing codebase, expertise and ecosystems is much more reasonable than rewrite everything in javascript.
> Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs
It is really powerful as compared to Javascript. It is even really powerful as compared to most other languages people normally use. But not very powerful as compared to languages that have 'proper' type systems. Typescript still relies on you writing tests for everything.
The type system is a huge boon for the developer experience, of course. It enables things like automatic refactoring that make development much more pleasant (although LLMs are getting better at filling that void in dynamically typed languages). But it doesn't save you from bugs in a way that the tests you have to write anyway won't also save you from. And those same tests would also catch the same bugs in Javascript, so you're in the same place either way with respect to that.
From experience, corporations usually don't give the general public any trademarked name. I assume TypeScript is trademarked right now; and I doubt Microsoft would ever liberate this. So in this regard, the corporations act in the same manner - selfish.
If browser makers offered to put it in the browser if the name is freed, I bet they could be convinced. The main problem right now, is that there isn't a major push to add TS to the browser.
The way I'm proposing it, technically it would be to make JS and TS kind of the same thing, but not fully, as someone else mentioned the goal of TS is still to tell the user (developer) about issues before the code runs. However, if done right TS files still get interpreted like normal JS, and technically you would want to compile them and not put them in the browser "raw" but you could still call it TS.
Only if you change TS to have actually sound types and it enables good performance instead of enabling you to craft extraordinarily convoluted types for stuff that you should have never written in the first place.
Put another way, I'm fine with the TS syntax (and use TS because there aren't other choices), but the TS semantics aren't a good long-term solution.
So then the user gets a type error in their face instead of the page loading? That doesn't really sound better than the developer getting that error while writing the code, which is what TypeScript currently does.
In my mind, the alternative is running TypeScript while writing and at build time. Type checking at runtime is at best redundant, and at worst an excuse to skip type checking and have it blow up in the users' face.
I think that’s not crazy at all. You can run TypeScript in Node already and you can run Playwright scripts directly in TypeScript. Next logical step is that browsers start running it directly.
> 1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.
The irony is I belive the JavaScript creator wtnted to latch to Java's popularity to called it JavaScript and now both Java and JavaScript are owned by Oracle and they want the name but not want to change is to ECMAScript, it's real official name.
If you read the original JavaScript press release ( https://web.archive.org/web/20020808041248/http://wp.netscap... ), it's mainly intended as a language to write glue code so Java applets (where the real application logic would go) can interact with a webpage:
> With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information.
> "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."
This was all actually implemented. JavaScript functions could call Java applet methods and vice versa (see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deplo... ). Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems, and JavaScript became a good enough language to write application logic directly in it. Still, there's more meaning behind the name than it just being a cynical marketing move.
Is groovy actually really "adopted" much of anywhere? I feel like for 99% of normal people, their only real exposure to it is as the DSL of gradle and jenkins.
I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.
Rundeck uses it for its plugins. It might be like how people use lua for their main program's dynamic scripting except they know Java so they use groovy.
Have to agree with the previous person. Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy. Even with Beanshell I've included it a few times in other projects for basic scripting/customization within the app but groovy? Never in 15 years to now.
I think embedding and testing/plugins/DSLs really is the main use-case. It's a terrible fit for a CLI tool if you've got to wait for a JVM to boot up, especially in a world where people are now used to those kinds of things being instantaneous rust or go binaries.
I had a flash ad take 100% of my cpu back around 2005 or so. It wasn’t even trying to be malicious, just a poorly made ad. That was the day I stopped allowing any site exceptions in my ad blocker.
Of course 100% of that cpu is probably 1/10 of one core on any of my modern machines, so an ordinary and not-broken ad laden page routinely eats several times as many cycles now. Progress!
The story is somewhat more complicated than that and not amenable to a simple summary, because there are multiple entities with multiple motivations involved. Keeping it simple, the reason why the press release babbles about that is that that is corporate Netscape talking at the height of the Java throat-forcing era. Those of you who were not around for it have no equivalent experience for how Java was being marketed back then because no language since then has been backed by such a marketing budget, but Java was being crammed down our throats whether you like it or not. Not entirely unlike AI is today, only programmers were being even more targeted and could have been seeing more inflation-adjusted-dollar-per-person spend since the set of people being targeted is so much smaller than AI's "everyone in the world" target.
This cramming did not have any regard for whether Java was a good solution for a given problem, or indeed whether the Java of that era could solve the problem at all. It did not matter. Java was Good. Good was Java. Java was the Future. Java was the Entire Future. Get on board or get left behind. It was made all the more infuriating for the fact that the Java of this time period was not very good at all; terrible startup, terrible performance, absolutely shitty support for anything we take for granted nowadays like GUIs or basic data structure libraries, garbage APIs shoved out the door as quickly as possible so they could check the bullet point that "yes, java did that" as quickly as possible, like Java's copy-of-a-copy of the C++ streaming (which are themselves widely considered a terrible idea and an antipattern today!).
I'm not even saying this because I'm emotional or angry about it or hate Java today. Java today is only syntactically similar to Java in the 90s. It hardly resembles it in any other way. Despite the emotional tone of some of what I'm saying, I mean this as descriptive. Things really were getting shoveled out the door with a minimum of design and no real-world testing so that the Java that they were spending so much marketing money on could be said that yes! It connected to this database! Yes! It speaks XML! Yes! It has a cross-platform GUI! These things all barely work as long as you don't subject them to a stiff breeze, but the bullet point is checked!
The original plan was for Java to simply be the browser language, because that's what the suits wanted, because probably that's what the suits were being paid to want. Anyone can look around today and see that that is not a great match for a browser language, and a scripting language was a better idea especially for the browser in the beginning. However, the suits did not care.
The engineers did, and they were able to sneak a scripting language into the browser by virtue of putting "Java" in the name, which was enough to fool the suits. If my previous emotional text still has not impressed upon you the nature of this time, consider what this indicates from a post-modern analysis perspective. Look at Java. Look at Javascript. Observe their differences. Observe how one strains to even draw any similarities between them beyond the basics you get from being a computer language. Yet simply slapping the word "Java" on the language was enough to get the suits to not ask any more questions until much, much later. That's how crazy the Java push was at the time... you could slip an entirely different scripting language in under the cover of the incredible propaganda for Java.
So while the press release will say that it was intended to glue Java applets, because that's what the suits needed to hear at that point, it really wasn't the case and frankly it was never even all that great at it. Turns out bridging the world between Java and Javascript is actually pretty difficult; in 2025 we pay the requisite memory and CPU costs without so much as blinking but in an era of 32 or 64 MEGAbyte RAM profiles it was nowhere near as casual. The reality is that what Javascript was intended to be by the actual people who created it and essentially snuck it in under the noses of the suits is exactly what it is today: The browser scripting language. I think you also had some problems like we still have today with WASM trying to move larger things back and forth between the environments, only much, much more so.
We all wish it had more than a week to cook before being shoved out the door itself, but it was still immensely more successful than Java ever could have been.
(Finally, despite my repeated use of the term "suits", I'm not a radical anti-business hippie hacker type. I understand where my paycheck comes from. I'm not intrinsically against "business people". I use the term perjoratively even so. The dotcom era was full of bullshit and they earned that perjorative fair and square.)
"Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.
> "Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.
They explained that in detail in the article. You don't need to remember correctly, you need to read the article. People who comment like you without doing the bare minimum, i.e. read what they're commenting on, should stop and think, what do you think you're contributing by doing that??
Oracle is in the business of bullying others using their big legal dept.
We all know this.
> Oracle has no business claiming javascript as a trademark.
You think so. That's okay. But ultimately it is up to a judge to decide. Right?
I agree with the EcmaScript. Just ditch the stupid name. Get all the petition signers to agree an move on. Fuck Oracle. Fuck JavaScript (it's nothing like Java anyway).
> But ultimately it is up to a judge to decide. Right?
I think we are getting a rude awakening about what is legal versus what is actually right are not always the same thing. There are some the horrible, horrible things here and the laws need updating, as opposed to us simply saying this is for a judge to decide and there is nothing else we can do.
I am ok with ditching the JavaScript name. I understand this cuts the problem entirely. However, there are other problems we have that we can't bypass so easily.
We need copyright terms to be much reduced. We need CFAA fully repealed and not replaced by anything. We need to abolish software patents. There is a lot we need to do that will likely take a century to accomplish and that's likely being too optimistic.
What we can't do is leave everything up to the judges because clearly even if we get a favorable ruling today, the precedent can be removed by another stroke of a pen.
> I think we are getting a rude awakening about what is legal versus what is actually right are not always the same thing.
I'm not sure who "we" are here (Americans perhaps?), but humanity as a whole have known this for a long time, and acted accordingly. This is why presidents in some countries have the right to pardon people, as just one very evident example. That the USA exists as a country today is another example, which at the time when they were trying to create it, was clearly illegal, but since winners write history, still a "good" action.
The the laws aren't 100% unambiguous and strict is also another example, so there is room for interpretation, as something can be "by the book legal" but because of the clear evil motivations and "ignoring the spirit of the law", still be illegal. Of course, highly dependent on the country and lots of counter-examples.
In terms of standard, the specs already use "ECMAScript" and don't even mention JavaScript (https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/), although TC39 website does use it frequently. I guess they could officially recommend people stop using "JavaScript", but I doubt they care.
Otherwise, the petitioner Deno here is only a small part of the ecosystem and barely controls anything (and really nobody other than TC39 controls anything, which is good). They (or anyone else) can't just shout "stop saying JavaScript!" and expect people to follow.
Not to mention JavaScript is a simple, easy to pronounce word compared to ECMAScript despite the baggage, which is probably why they chose it in the first place.
Let's say the "JavaScript" name is officially deprecated somehow. People will continue to use the name for as long as it exists.
So Deno's petition tackles these problems, addresses the root cause and appears to be legally viable. That is the "right thing to do" here. Avoiding the name does not solve the problem. It never does.
Our trade has a solid tradition of terrible names for programming languages. They are ALL bad. The whole Ekmuhscrip.js schism fits perfectly. Yes, this is our circus, and these are our monkeys.
That’s not retrocompatible with all the .js files out there though.
One possibility is thus just make some vocalic derivation, which align with well known spontaneous evolution of languages like ablaut[1]. Following that, and keeping the dance connotation, jive[2] is an option. Or closer on phonetic distance to java (/ˈd͡ʒɑː.və/), there is jovial (/ˈd͡ʒəʊ.vɪ.əl/ or /ˈd͡ʒoʊ.vɪ.əl/ or /ˈd͡ʒoʊ.vəl/)[3].
I see that there's something called that related to javascript already, but like -- very similar spelling, ".js" still works, we lose the Java confusion etc etc.
I'm from the java world and it is basically java. Sure that it can do a lot more, for the most part any java developer will fell at home with the exception of lacking a robust static typing and the IDEs aren't really as good to spot syntax errors. I mean no shade to javascript developers, you just get used to a very robust building environment over there.
It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun).
Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.
> Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.
That is why on one level I am surprised by the petition. They are talking to a supercharged litigation monster and are asking it "Dear Oracle, ... We urge you to release the mark into the public domain". You know what a litigation happy behemoth does in that case? It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark. Before they didn't care but now that someone pointed it out, they'll go out of their way to assert their usage of it.
On the other hand, maybe someone there cares about their image and would be happy to improve it in the tech community's eyes...
> It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark.
IANAL, but I don't think that wouldn't be enough to keep the trademark.
Also the petition was a "we'll ask nicely first so we can all avoid the hastle and expense of legal procedings", they are now in the process of getting the trademark invalidated, but Oracle, illogically but perhaps unsurprisingly is fighting it.
I was just using it as an example of doing the absolute minimum. They could write a dumb Javascript debugger or something with minimal effort.
But yeah, IANAL either and just guessing, I just know Oracle is shady and if you challenge them legally they'll throw their weight around. And not sure if responding to a challenge with a new "product" is enough to reset the clock on it. Hopefully a the judge will see through their tricks.
Trademark law is kind of about hypotheticals though. The purpose of a trademark is to prevent theoretical damages from potential confusion, neither of which you ever have to show to be real
In this case the trademark existing and belonging to Oracle is creating more confusion than no trademark existing, so deleting it is morally right. And because Oracle isn't actually enforcing it it is also legally right
Imho this is just the prelude to get better press. "We filed a petition to delete the JavaScript trademark" doesn't sound nearly as good as "We collected 100k signatures for a letter to Oracle and only got silence, now we formally petition the USPTO". It's also a great opportunity to find pro-bono legal council or someone who would help fund the petition
The other aspect here is that general knowledge (citation needed) says that if a company doesn't actively defend their trademark, they often won't be able to keep it if challenged in court. Or perhaps general knowledge is wrong.
Assuming Oracle did decide to go down that route, who would they sue? No one really uses the JavaScript name in anything official except for "JavaScriptCore" that Apple ships with Webkit.
My bad, after reading more it seems Deno is trying to get Oracle's trademark revoked, but I found out that "Rust for Javascript" devs have received a cease and desist from Oracle regarding the JS trademark, which may have triggered Deno to go after Oracle.
The incredibly litigious company here is Deno. Deno sued on a whim, realized they were massively unprepared, then asked the public to fund a legal campaign that will benefit Deno themselves, a for-profit, VC-backed company.
This personal vendetta will likely end with the community unable to use the term JavaScript. Nobody should support this.
1. Oracle is the litigious one here. My favorite example is that time they attacked a professor for publishing less-than-glowing benchmarks of their database: https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/ What's to stop them from suing anyone using the term JavaScript in a way that isn't blessed by them? That's what Deno is trying to protect against.
2. Deno is filing a petition to cancel the trademark, not claim it themselves. This would return it to the public commons.
It should be obvious from these two facts that any member of the public that uses JavaScript should support this, regardless of what they think of Deno-the-company.
The fact that you wrote it wrong is hilariously ironic.
JavaScript is simply the better term, and marketing is everything. Reminds me of Java's POJOs, which was a very simple pattern that no one used, until someone gave them a fancy name.
ECMAScript is a horrible technical name. Might as well call it ACMEScript considering how willie e. coyote it feels to develop with it...
> POTS = Plain Old Telephony System
I worked for NY Telephone for years in the '80s, and it was referred to there as "Plain Old Telephone Service" not System. Not that it's a big deal at this point!
This is extremely ironic given that JavaScript was so named because people do give a damn about names so Netscape/Sun leveraged the Java success to push JS, hence they named it JAVAscript despite it having nothing to do with Java.
Not everybody knows. People who learn JavaScript don't know. In fact, they must learn this. And from my experience, most learning resources don't mention this, let alone teach this. It took me a really long time to understand what ECMAScript is and how it relates to JavaScript. And the effort I put in this understanding... I would have preferred to not having needed that.
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
Wasn't that a copyright issue? I thought the point of contention is that Google allegedly copied Oracle's API design when they re-wrote Java for Android.
The license is Apache 2.0. With the trademark, they can tell everyone not to call their thing TypeScript but at this point, given the license, they can't tell them not to copy it and change it and distribute that new thing (assuming the new distributors do so under the correct conditions).
Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true.
Non-exhaustive examples:
let foo = 2
foo = "foo" // TS disallows type change
let bar = {}
bar.baz = 2 // TS disallows adding property
The amount of weird TS I see that attempts to keep the JS style of code while getting the compiler to stop being mad is strange. I will see hundreds of line of type inference work, when they could have just made an actual type.
OT, but I learned Lua this year in order to be able to write a mod for a game, and maybe this is due to it being a while since I last used a dynamic language regularly, but Lua really feels like it's basically what JavaScript was intended to be. Both use a map-like data structure for basically everything, with integer keys to make them act like arrays, function values to make them act as objects, but Lua using an explicit function call in `for ... in` loops avoided needing a separate construct to be added later on for iterating over arrays in order (or having to resort to manually iterating over the numbers rather than the array itself). Lua's module system reminds me a lot of how Node's `exports` works (although nowadays I understand there are other ways of importing/exporting stuff in JavaScript), and it's not obvious to me that the power of prototypes in JavaScript are worth the extra complexity over using the module system for the pre-ES6 model of OO that JavaScript used. I feel like Lua basically already has solved most of the stuff that JS has needed to add a lot of new features for in recent years. I imagine this is something that a lot of people were already aware of, but at least personally, even being cognizant of the flaws that JS had been trying to fix, I hadn't realized an already well-established language had a design that solved most of them without also having a lot of additional scope beyond what JS was trying to do (e.g. Python having full-fledged class-based OO) or at least superficially looking a lot different (e.g. some form of lisp, which I know had been at least talked about in the early web days as a potential option but might have faced more of an uphill battle for adoption).
Why is this worth doing? What wrong with the status quo? The author does not give any examples of Oracle threatening people for using the JavaScript (tm) name.
The problem is FUD. Some guy at a company gets told he has to wait for legal to approve some open source project or initiative that happens to use JS in the name, because his boss heard there’s a trademark issue, and the enthusiasm fades and the idea gets sidelined. There’s probably been thousands of tiny little instances of FUD like that, which we’d never hear about, and which have led to good things not happening.
One clear instance of FUD we do know about is the spec itself is not titled with the name of the language it specifies, which is then its own source of confusion for newcomers trying to learn the web platform, and makes it harder for old timers to explain things, and is generally annoying. Complexity. Confusion. Doubt. Inaction.
Removing legal FUD from the world is a good cause. I don’t mind if it also works as a good marketing play for Deno.
This! I dont think people realize how many people fold like this. Almost nothing actually gets litigated. Litigation is a huge risk and very expensive. The profit incentive at companies means this fight is almost never worth it and its just easier to fold and use a competitor's technology.
The petition was partially dismissed and Deno was given leave to amend their petition (but no amended petition has yet been filed, that I can see). There was some initial worthless discovery and now a protective order has been granted allowing Oracle to file information they don't want out in public (e.g. trade secrets). That was at the beginning of November 2025 and the case is ongoing.
Exactly. When was the last time you heard HTML called "HyperText Markup Language"? When was the last time you heard CSS called "Cascading Style Sheets"? We should stop saying "JavaScript" and fully switch to JS.
I guess that's the main issue. A lot of open source projects fell into this pit, when they put a related trademark into their name. Naming something OpenFastFirefox or iPhoneScript would cause a lot of trademark issues.
How about we stop using Javascript completely or greatly limit its usage. It's time to go back to simple webpages that load instantly on modern hardware and that do not leak information about the user. JS makes it way, way too easy to track people on the Internet as it is.
Speaking of JavaScript's evolution - I've been building a music player (muz11.com) and it's remarkable how far we've come. The Web Audio API, MediaSession for lock screen controls, smooth animations via requestAnimationFrame... all running client-side with no framework, just vanilla JS. Thirty years ago this would have required a desktop app and probably a record label deal.
The irony is that 'freeing' JavaScript from Oracle's trademark might matter less than freeing ourselves from the framework churn. The platform itself is incredibly capable now.
Honest question for companies like Oracle, Google and Microsoft that own the trademark to Javascript, Go and Typescript respectively. What value does it bring to these companies to own these trademarks?
The only case I can really see is someone going off and creating another language and then proceeding to call it, Javascript, Typscript or Go and then using the same logo but I feel at that point the developer community would be pretty effective in sorting that out without getting lawyers involved.
Well, look at how Microsoft tried to hijack the JVM back in the 90s. I think the big fear is that somebody creates a "mostly compatible" product, that in fact isn't 100% compatible, and tries to market it as the same thing as the original, which in fact isn't the original.
Based on the link someone put in a different comment about them suing Deno, at least in Oracle's case the answer is presumably "being able to sue people and get money from them".
Even if that weren't the case though, I think part of the problem is that even if the trademarks literally never brings any value, it also potentially costs them nothing to retain them (unless someone tries to get it invalidated, at which point there's some cost to trying to defend it). Arguably the cost to establish in the trademark in the first place is also low enough that companies at that scale don't have much incentive notto establish them in the first piece; they already have lawyers and trademarking things isn't really out of the ordinary for them, so the marginal cost of having them file one more isn't very high.
It's worth considering whether the point you make about there not being much of a realistic concern around someone else attempting to copy the name is something that would be obvious to non-developers. Sometimes what might be obvious to a developer might not be obvious to a lawyer, and at the end of the day, the legal team is probably in charge of deciding things like this at these companies, so in the absence of pressure from someone who understands this point enough influence to make it happen (like maybe a C-level exec), it might not matter that the concern is realistic if it's theoretically plausible.
This is a very weak letter. Oracle is using the mark in commerce, and the 2019 specimen is presumed valid unless affirmatively disproven. The fact that Oracle doesn’t charge licensing fees for use of the name is irrelevant. Calling something JavaScript ‘JavaScript’ is nominative use, and any attempt by Oracle to enforce against such truthful descriptive use would fail under nominative fair use.
Oh, this reminds me of the horror days when Oracle deliberately rolled out spyware (Ask Toolbar) in the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installer, that corporate admins and developers/testers inadvertently installed on millions of PCs.
Oracle never apologised for this sudden hijack (of an executable that was trusted and used by millions of IT people) and malicious behavior (no prior information given by Oracle for this malpractice), if I recall right.
I am sure that disaster was a wake up call for many developers and corporations to move away from Java dependency.
While I completely agree with the sentiment, there are 100 million reasons why it will never happen. Having dealt with Oracle for over 20 years, I have seen their predatory relationship with their customers. They will hold onto this trademark in the hope that they can somehow monetize it.
At some point they will approach companies, likely tech companies that produce a product or offering that can't be described without using the word "JavaScript". They will offer a "convenient" licensing agreement of $50,000 per year for the use of their trademark.
There is sadly no equivalent to {foo: 1} in Dart. This difference stems from Darts class based object model while JSs is, as you probably know, prototype based
Imagine if this effort was spent on solving more pressing problems, like the recent yet another security kerfuffle, or the overloaded maintainers whom everyone depends on but reliably fails to support.
Call the language JS, everyone already understands it, it's used on all the logos because it's short, we already another popular language with a very compact name (Go, which is harder to look up without mangling its name, and it's still doing fine).
Whether the JS community can organize to address those issues may in fact depend on the real and social capital that this seemingly auxiliary campaign has the opportunity to effect.
Deno is very good at marketing: they also have a nice page about the history of JS.
But just like with this JS trademark thing, it feels like they present themselves as spokespeople and spearhead for the whole JS community, which feels kind of misleading and grandiose.
The mentioned timeline site (link below) also has this issue: it slowly shifts focus from things like the first JS version, the creation of XMLHttpRequest, to later focusing on Deno milestones, as if these events would have had comparable impacts:
And that seems kind of dishonest and designed to nudge outsiders towards thinking Deno would be the default server runtime now, which doesn't seem to be true.
the og lang should have been named coffeescript. Then the coffeescript in our universe could have been named javascript, until better tooling and improvements to the coffeescript spec became implemented by popular browsers.
Anyone reasonable would agree that Oracle does not even gain anything for their products by holding the trademark. They have zero benefit, except of course occasional bullying.
This looks to me that Deno folks are out of business options and decided to create a distraction instead, of selling us why to use Deno instead of nodejs.
Rust runs quite well today via WebAssembly. Continuing to improve interop between Web API / WASM / language runtimes seems like a good route that allows people to use the language they prefer against shared Web APIs.
I'm a huge fan of statically typed languages, but shipping statically typed code as an artifact seems like it loses all of the advantages.
What does it matter to the user whether they get a runtime or a "compile time" error in their invisible devtools console? To them, the page simply doesn't work.
Static languages make sense when compilation happens at dev-time, where the actual devs can respond to the diagnostics. So it's far better to develop in a statically typed language, compile it ahead of time and ship that to the user. Which is exactly what people do now with wasm.
Dart is a statically typed high performance language intended for the browser. For a short time you could run Dart in the Chrome browser - as a JavaScript alternative. They then decided it was better to transpile to JS...
JavaScript is already strictly typed and safe, but the dynamic nature makes it difficult to optimize. So I think it's a weird decision to transpile to JS.
Developers always on their high horse, if after years of trying different options it didnt happen, maybe that means it's not what the world wants or need?
Important to remember Oracle is one of the most evil tech companies, and Larry Ellison is your prototypical evil villain. Oracle CEO Catz recently said "We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none" and "if they don't agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren't the right company for them".
I've said it before, I'll say it again. We should just stop using the term JavaScript. It's a bad choice of name and always has been.
It's caused way too much confusion over the years making people wrongly associate it with Java. My guess would be that associations exactly why Oracle doesn't want to give it up.
I would like to say go back to the original name of LiveScript from before Netscape tried to woo Sun, but the name LiveScript has been co-opted.
Something else with a J would probably be the least painful. JScript is permanently associated with Microsoft's terrible IE implementation. I offer up "JaScript" as it sounds largely like JavaScript but said with a drawl while retaining "JS".
Heck, I'll call it ECMAScript if that's what it takes. I'd rather not, but it's better than "JavaScript"
This has so many unintended consequences for LLM over the next four years I would think.
"JavaScript" tokenizes to 2 tokens (BPE). "ECMAScript" tokenizes to 3. No biggie here.
But the real cost isn't training—it's inference. Every time an LLM has to reconcile "ES6" with "JavaScript," explain the naming, or reason through "user said JavaScript but docs say ECMAScript"— Hidden chain-of-thought overhead. Clarification tokens.
Back of envelope: ~376M JS-related LLM queries/day globally. ~30% trigger some clarification overhead. That's ~5B extra tokens/day, ~1.85T tokens/year.
At ~0.000025 kWh/token inference cost, that's ~46 GWh/year.
~23,000 tonnes CO2 annually.
~200,000 tonnes over 4 years, based on rough growth of LLM use, and terms sticking around on both names over 4 years - probably wrong here too.
Sources
Token counts: OpenAI tiktoken cl100k_base encoder
2.5B ChatGPT queries/day: Sam Altman, July 2025 [1]
~4.7B total LLM interactions/day: aggregated from ChatGPT + Gemini (2B monthly AI Overviews users) + Copilot + Claude + others [2][3]
JS = 62% of developers: Stack Overflow 2024 Survey [4]
8% of queries JS-related: my estimate based on language prevalence
30% clarification rate: my estimate - probably way off
Energy/token: ~0.000025 kWh blended from Luccioni et al. and Patterson et al. inference estimates [5]
Random nerd note: The history is slightly wrong. Netscape had their own "interactive script" language at the time Sun started talking about Java and somehow got the front page of the Mercury news when they announced it in March of 1995. At the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt Germany everyone was talking about it and I was roped into giving a session on it during lunch break (which then had to be stopped because no one was going to the keynote by SGI :-)). Everyone one there was excited and saying "forget everything, this is the future." So, Netscape wanted to incorporate it into Netscape Navigator (their browser) but they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language. They wanted to call it JavaScript to ride the coattails of the Java excitement and Sun legal only agreed to let them do that if they would promise to ship Java in their browser when it hit 1.0 (which it did in September of that year).
So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.
So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.
Was the "interactive script" LiveScript or something else?
---
Edit: The above makes it sound like there was another scripting language:
> they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language.
yeah, LiveScript was renamed JavaScript.
And it was node before there was such thing, with LiveScript Server.
Do you mind being immodest and let us know a little bit about your involvement for context?
What was your involvement with Netscape?
I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun. Here's a picture of most of us at the time : http://mcmanis.com/chuck/original_java_team.html (this was originally in the HotJava distribution Sun gave out when the source was released.)
I was doing security, networking, crypto, and a bit of Solaris support along with others. Basically I was a 'systems' guy vs a 'language' guy like James, Arthur and Richard. We all participated in the integration with Navigator and had weekly meetings with Netscape while we were doing that.
They now have GoFundMe where they are soliciting donations for a discovery phase of a <strike>patent</strike> trademark cancellation request.
They have just 50k USD out of 200k USD they are raising. (No idea if that's appropriate; from the outside, it seems like a lot of money, but also they are fighting Oracle which has unlimited money, so, yeah)
For some reason it's not linked in the page itself.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-challenge-oracles-javascr...
https://deno.com/blog/javascript-tm-gofundme
Not to nit-pic, but it's a Trademark cancellation - not a patent. The confusion probably came from the fact it's before the US Patent and Trademark Office.
to nitpick, short of holding evidence of a literal internal memoradum stating it, $100,000 or $100,000,000,000 won't be able to prove that a company has no intention to resume the use of a trademark at some point. the entire affair is pointless fantasy
Wouldn't Oracle's use of the Java trademark be problematic in a trademark cancellation request? We're talking about two very similar names for identical product types (i.e. programming languages). Indeed the similarity was originally intended to imply an association. I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle's sole interest in the trademark is due to its similarity and history.
Oracle's sole interest is extracting money from its assets through whatever tactics are most effective, regardless of technical merit (not specific to JavaScript I guess though)
I think this is accurate. No way for them to give up JavaScript and not risk giving up Java.
Someone should patent <blink>.
Side question: can the CEO or sole proprietor of a corporation/small business/ nonprofit litigate pro se on behalf of their company? I know you can do this when acting as an individual, but if a business is too poor to afford representation, can they "wing it" as a last ditch measure? Or is it checkmate at that point?
If possible, I would like to see the good guys in these cases go down fighting, and try to delay proceedings and waste as much money of their well-funded opponents as possible.
Only if the owner happens to be a lawyer. Otherwise it would be the illegal practice of law.
If you are legally authorized to sign on behalf of a business you can sign court filings for it.
I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript, because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). I wish Oracle started suing people to force everyone to use the better name.
> because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway).
Probably if we were in the early 2000s this could have been a battle worth fighting. But considering we're in 2025 and probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point, even when you're deep in enterprise-land, I'm not sure it'd be less confusing.
Anyways, you're about two decades too late to this discussion :/
> probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point
All the same, I probably get as many calls from recruiters to fill Java positions as I do JS positions. I've never used the former, and explaining it is always awkward!
I would tell them they are wasting your time by not offering you fitting jobs. It's on them to know what they are looking for, not on you
To be frank this is a service to you. No company you want to work at has a recruiter that doesn't understand the difference (a fully AI recruiter would be better than this experience).
For normal people Java is a short way to say JavaScript.
I have never heard anyone do that. Do “normal” people even discuss JavaScript?
I think normal people are actually aware what JS and HTML are. Most people are more tech savvy than we give them credit - or credit they might give themselves.
I think normal people don't know the difference between google and a web browser. Even many of the ones that used to understand the difference forgot some time after their primary computing device became a locked down phone.
Can confirm. My wife (who is a very normal person) was using bing the other day and when I pointed it out she asked me what I was talking about and pointed to the chrome browser icon in the taskbar. The level of confusion is almost unfathomable to us.
Yes for normal teenagers in the early 2000s or so (MySpace encouraged experimentation and there were many sites where people would upload copy/pastable javascript snippets for their sites), outside of that group I'm not so sure.
Maybe 1 in 10000 people who aren't developers.
Idk both of my parents do any they're not devs - they don't even have a pc or laptop, they just have a phone.
But they DO work in an office, and use a web browser for 8 hours a day.
It’s an Albany expression.
I don't think I've ever met one of these people.
You mean ab-normal, I guess
sometimes we make silly errors for years or decades and no one spots them. if you've been saying you hate java bloat/frameworks/whatever and meaning you hate javascript bloat/frameworks/whatever, people would probably agree with both. no one would be the wiser.
From days of old...
Invoking Applet Methods From JavaScript Code - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...
and
Invoking JavaScript Code From an Applet - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...
Aside from the "Java is cool, name everything Java" in the early days - there was scripting between the browser and the applet using a language named JavaScript.
I actually used this back in the day: once at university, and then again for a telecoms project in my first job.
But it doesn't mean there's much commonality - beyond superficially C-like syntax - between the languages, and certainly not between their "standard libraries" (aka the browser APIs in JavaScript's case).
Eh, JavaScript wasn't the originally chosen name, it was LiveScript by Eich. I've never seen a justification for the name from anyone in the know, other than Eich's musing that Netscape wanted the "cool" factor. That "cool" factor was also why the original task of embedding scheme into the browser turned into a more C/Java-esque flavor.
> Java applets can invoke JavaScript functions present in the same web page as the applet. The LiveConnect Specification describes details about how JavaScript code communicates with Java code.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...
> LiveConnect is a feature of web browsers which allows Java applets to communicate with the JavaScript engine in the browser, and JavaScript on the web page to interact with applets. The LiveConnect concept originated in the Netscape web browser, and to this date, Mozilla and Firefox browsers have had the most complete support for LiveConnect features. It has, however, been possible to call between JavaScript and Java in some fashion on all web browsers for a number of years.
https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/liveconnect-...
--
The naming appears to be confused.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101115234856/http://www.oracle...
> Improved Java/JavaScript communication. The bridge between the JavaScript engine in the web browser and the Java programming language has been completely reimplemented. The new implementation is backward-compatible and features improved reliability, performance and cross-browser portability, for both Java calling JavaScript as well as JavaScript calling Java. Formerly Mozilla-specific "LiveConnect" functionality, such as the ability to call static Java methods, instantiate new Java objects and reference third-party packages from JavaScript, is now available in all browsers.
The "LiveConnect" relating to the original LiveScript maybe? And that LiveConnect was a Netscape/Mozilla driven thing.
My point was more one of "JavaScript was the glue between applets and the HTML page itself early in the development of the language."
Renaming LiveScript to JavaScript and promoting the LiveConnect functionality wasn't an unreasonable thing at the time.
Sun was pushing it as a way to script Java applets. Might have even worked out if LiveConnect (the interface layer between Java and JS) wasn't such buggy trash.
And if Java wouldn't have been such a big beast. The startup times for the runtime and memory usage were way too high for a good experience for most user's machines.
Oh man what a world it would be if browsers just interpreted scheme (or something close) instead of javascript
The original design for <script> was supposed to be extensible, and IE of all things actually allowed any "active scripting" engine to be used, so for a brief time you had things like Perl and Tcl as scripting languages, but only on Windows.
We'll probably get there again with wasm, eventually. But it's taking a very long time.
Yeah, I agree with you. I remember being annoyed by the name in 1999 because, as you say, JavaScripts's not got much to do with Java other than both languages being superficially C-like... but I don't see it as being confusing for more time than it takes to read introductory tutorials for each language.
There are more important battles to fight.
I am going to sound crazy, but, if Microsoft would free up TypeScript and every browser added native TypeScript features to JavaScript… and then we all just started calling it TypeScript. Maybe? Then you would see native ts files. Oracle will never give up JS. The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.
For years we said bring something sane to browsers instead of trying to salvage js. At this point, though, why don't they just implement DOM bindings in wasm and make internets a better place overnight?
TypeScript is a really decent language though, I wouldn't feel happier or more productive using Fortran or whatever. Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs, and it's easy to write functional code with correct-by-construction data. If you need some super optimized code then sure that's what WASM is for but that's not the problem with most web apps, the usual problem is bad design, but then choice of language doesn't save you. Sure TS has some annoying legacy stuff from JS but every language has cruft, and with strict linting you can eliminate it.
It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.
> It's also better if there's one ecosystem instead of one fragmented with different languages where you have to write bindings for everything you want to use.
This argument is slightly backwards. This is essentially the argument used for "javascript in the backend" and "let's package the whole browser as application runtime so we can use javascript". The core of the argument is that javascript is ipso facto the best language/runtime to write any code in, including refactoring existing codebases. Bringing javascript out of the browser also means you have to write bindings for javascript and recreate the existing ecosystems anyway.
Even if you approach this from "single codebase across runtimes" angle, the conclusion to bridge the gap between browsers and languages with existing codebase, expertise and ecosystems is much more reasonable than rewrite everything in javascript.
Everything is already written in JavaScript. If we had WASM from the start and dozens of languages with different APIs we wouldn't be better off.
> Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs
It is really powerful as compared to Javascript. It is even really powerful as compared to most other languages people normally use. But not very powerful as compared to languages that have 'proper' type systems. Typescript still relies on you writing tests for everything.
The type system is a huge boon for the developer experience, of course. It enables things like automatic refactoring that make development much more pleasant (although LLMs are getting better at filling that void in dynamically typed languages). But it doesn't save you from bugs in a way that the tests you have to write anyway won't also save you from. And those same tests would also catch the same bugs in Javascript, so you're in the same place either way with respect to that.
Its type system is also full of holes because it has to be compatible with JavaScript, being a superset.
Sure, the type system isn't perfect but it still beats 90% of mainstream languages in use today.
I love WASM, I do appreciate that it is slowly but reasonably growing into its final destination.
From experience, corporations usually don't give the general public any trademarked name. I assume TypeScript is trademarked right now; and I doubt Microsoft would ever liberate this. So in this regard, the corporations act in the same manner - selfish.
TFA says Microsoft offered the JScript trademark to be used in place of JavaScript, so there’s some indication of willingness to give up a trademark.
If browser makers offered to put it in the browser if the name is freed, I bet they could be convinced. The main problem right now, is that there isn't a major push to add TS to the browser.
The way I'm proposing it, technically it would be to make JS and TS kind of the same thing, but not fully, as someone else mentioned the goal of TS is still to tell the user (developer) about issues before the code runs. However, if done right TS files still get interpreted like normal JS, and technically you would want to compile them and not put them in the browser "raw" but you could still call it TS.
If you can find the clip on you tube where he says it, it's even funnier. But sadly also true.
https://simonwillison.net
> The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.
Is it? My experience in the past decade is that there are more memes about people who confuse the 2 than people that confuse the 2.
Heh - it depends on the "Project Damagers" you have to work with...
Native type annotations in ecmascript is a serious proposal that gained some traction for quite a while but seems to have fallen off
https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations
Only if you change TS to have actually sound types and it enables good performance instead of enabling you to craft extraordinarily convoluted types for stuff that you should have never written in the first place.
Put another way, I'm fine with the TS syntax (and use TS because there aren't other choices), but the TS semantics aren't a good long-term solution.
An important feature of TypeScript is identifying problems in your code before the user runs it, i.e. before a browser even comes into play.
No runtime type safety bites people often and in unexpected ways. It should just be standardized.
Sure, but that's an orthogonal concern. That sounds more like a call to standardise Zod.
So? If supported natively by the browser the browser could compile it on download.
You'll still get all the strong typing without have to wait for it to run.
For example an error in a little used branch would cause an error before the branch even runs.
So then the user gets a type error in their face instead of the page loading? That doesn't really sound better than the developer getting that error while writing the code, which is what TypeScript currently does.
Not to mention the penalty of the browser having to re-execute the type checking every time the files aren't loaded from cache.
> So then the user gets a type error in their face instead of the page loading?
The alternative is not "User sees no error", it's "user sees the error at runtime".
In which case, yeah, having the user see the type error is vastly preferable to having the user see a runtime JS error.
In my mind, the alternative is running TypeScript while writing and at build time. Type checking at runtime is at best redundant, and at worst an excuse to skip type checking and have it blow up in the users' face.
I think that’s not crazy at all. You can run TypeScript in Node already and you can run Playwright scripts directly in TypeScript. Next logical step is that browsers start running it directly.
Was going to say the same thing. I'm fine just using Typescript with types disabled (which is not the same as using TS without specifying types)
EcmaScript is an awful name. It sounds too similar to eczema or ectoplasm. Ugly name.
Nailed it. My brain always hears it as eczema script, which is never a good association.
The ectoplasm name makes me want to make a "Don't cross the fs.createWriteStream()s" joke.
Thought I was the only one seeing the resemblance (also flegma)
I don't know, I kind of like the name EctoScript. Although if it were me I'd just rename it WebScript and be done with it.
Agreed. WebScript would be better.
That’s always been my favorite proposal. WebScript is short and to the point.
Obligatory: https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...
> 1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.
How is ecma related with eczema, eczema has more syllables and it has a "z" in the middle that makes it completely different for crying out loud.
the fact that it sounds bad out loud is its undoing
Filename extension is .js, mime type is text/javascript, millions of people call it javascript. I don't see this changing anytime soon
Unrelated but, the JavaScript capitalization is so odd
Everything seemed to be Pascal case back then.
The irony is I belive the JavaScript creator wtnted to latch to Java's popularity to called it JavaScript and now both Java and JavaScript are owned by Oracle and they want the name but not want to change is to ECMAScript, it's real official name.
If you read the original JavaScript press release ( https://web.archive.org/web/20020808041248/http://wp.netscap... ), it's mainly intended as a language to write glue code so Java applets (where the real application logic would go) can interact with a webpage:
> With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information.
> "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."
This was all actually implemented. JavaScript functions could call Java applet methods and vice versa (see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deplo... ). Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems, and JavaScript became a good enough language to write application logic directly in it. Still, there's more meaning behind the name than it just being a cynical marketing move.
Happenstance, but that press release you linked to was December 4, 1995 - exactly 30 years ago today!
The language now called Groovy would have been JavaScript if the name wasn’t already taken.
Haha completely agree, it is the "scripting language" made in the image of Java! It's a great language by the way!
There was also beanshell if you remember, of course never as polished nor adopted like groovy but it was also fun to use.
Is groovy actually really "adopted" much of anywhere? I feel like for 99% of normal people, their only real exposure to it is as the DSL of gradle and jenkins.
I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.
Rackspace used (uses?) it.
Rundeck uses it for its plugins. It might be like how people use lua for their main program's dynamic scripting except they know Java so they use groovy.
>I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.
That's solely based on a poor imagination, not trying...
Have to agree with the previous person. Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy. Even with Beanshell I've included it a few times in other projects for basic scripting/customization within the app but groovy? Never in 15 years to now.
We use the Spock Framework for testing. It's the best testing framework in the JVM, no joke.
I think embedding and testing/plugins/DSLs really is the main use-case. It's a terrible fit for a CLI tool if you've got to wait for a JVM to boot up, especially in a world where people are now used to those kinds of things being instantaneous rust or go binaries.
> Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems,
Haha, or because it froze the whole browser for a few seconds upon loading. Unlike Macromedia Flash by the way.
I had a flash ad take 100% of my cpu back around 2005 or so. It wasn’t even trying to be malicious, just a poorly made ad. That was the day I stopped allowing any site exceptions in my ad blocker.
Of course 100% of that cpu is probably 1/10 of one core on any of my modern machines, so an ordinary and not-broken ad laden page routinely eats several times as many cycles now. Progress!
Websites can also use 100% of your CPU as well.
You might not be aware, but this is a trivial thing to do.
The story is somewhat more complicated than that and not amenable to a simple summary, because there are multiple entities with multiple motivations involved. Keeping it simple, the reason why the press release babbles about that is that that is corporate Netscape talking at the height of the Java throat-forcing era. Those of you who were not around for it have no equivalent experience for how Java was being marketed back then because no language since then has been backed by such a marketing budget, but Java was being crammed down our throats whether you like it or not. Not entirely unlike AI is today, only programmers were being even more targeted and could have been seeing more inflation-adjusted-dollar-per-person spend since the set of people being targeted is so much smaller than AI's "everyone in the world" target.
This cramming did not have any regard for whether Java was a good solution for a given problem, or indeed whether the Java of that era could solve the problem at all. It did not matter. Java was Good. Good was Java. Java was the Future. Java was the Entire Future. Get on board or get left behind. It was made all the more infuriating for the fact that the Java of this time period was not very good at all; terrible startup, terrible performance, absolutely shitty support for anything we take for granted nowadays like GUIs or basic data structure libraries, garbage APIs shoved out the door as quickly as possible so they could check the bullet point that "yes, java did that" as quickly as possible, like Java's copy-of-a-copy of the C++ streaming (which are themselves widely considered a terrible idea and an antipattern today!).
I'm not even saying this because I'm emotional or angry about it or hate Java today. Java today is only syntactically similar to Java in the 90s. It hardly resembles it in any other way. Despite the emotional tone of some of what I'm saying, I mean this as descriptive. Things really were getting shoveled out the door with a minimum of design and no real-world testing so that the Java that they were spending so much marketing money on could be said that yes! It connected to this database! Yes! It speaks XML! Yes! It has a cross-platform GUI! These things all barely work as long as you don't subject them to a stiff breeze, but the bullet point is checked!
The original plan was for Java to simply be the browser language, because that's what the suits wanted, because probably that's what the suits were being paid to want. Anyone can look around today and see that that is not a great match for a browser language, and a scripting language was a better idea especially for the browser in the beginning. However, the suits did not care.
The engineers did, and they were able to sneak a scripting language into the browser by virtue of putting "Java" in the name, which was enough to fool the suits. If my previous emotional text still has not impressed upon you the nature of this time, consider what this indicates from a post-modern analysis perspective. Look at Java. Look at Javascript. Observe their differences. Observe how one strains to even draw any similarities between them beyond the basics you get from being a computer language. Yet simply slapping the word "Java" on the language was enough to get the suits to not ask any more questions until much, much later. That's how crazy the Java push was at the time... you could slip an entirely different scripting language in under the cover of the incredible propaganda for Java.
So while the press release will say that it was intended to glue Java applets, because that's what the suits needed to hear at that point, it really wasn't the case and frankly it was never even all that great at it. Turns out bridging the world between Java and Javascript is actually pretty difficult; in 2025 we pay the requisite memory and CPU costs without so much as blinking but in an era of 32 or 64 MEGAbyte RAM profiles it was nowhere near as casual. The reality is that what Javascript was intended to be by the actual people who created it and essentially snuck it in under the noses of the suits is exactly what it is today: The browser scripting language. I think you also had some problems like we still have today with WASM trying to move larger things back and forth between the environments, only much, much more so.
We all wish it had more than a week to cook before being shoved out the door itself, but it was still immensely more successful than Java ever could have been.
(Finally, despite my repeated use of the term "suits", I'm not a radical anti-business hippie hacker type. I understand where my paycheck comes from. I'm not intrinsically against "business people". I use the term perjoratively even so. The dotcom era was full of bullshit and they earned that perjorative fair and square.)
Btw. What's your 3 favorite languages then?
wow. Do you have blog? You could totally write a book. Great style and verbose.
Well the creator wanted to call it livescript. The creating company (Netscape) wanted the Java association.
> and now both Java and JavaScript are owned by
"Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.
Well for the majority of us here, Sun acquisition by Oracle was just few years ago. It was a canon event and we still think about it hehe
You should consider reading the article.
You should consider including whatever point you are trying to make in the comment itself, instead of just a swipe without any details.
> "Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.
They explained that in detail in the article. You don't need to remember correctly, you need to read the article. People who comment like you without doing the bare minimum, i.e. read what they're commenting on, should stop and think, what do you think you're contributing by doing that??
That boat sailed soooo many years ago tho. Oracle has no business claiming javascript as a trademark.
Or let Oracle trial everyone for the number of processors they have on their JavaScript machines.
Oracle is in the business of bullying others using their big legal dept.
We all know this.
> Oracle has no business claiming javascript as a trademark.
You think so. That's okay. But ultimately it is up to a judge to decide. Right?
I agree with the EcmaScript. Just ditch the stupid name. Get all the petition signers to agree an move on. Fuck Oracle. Fuck JavaScript (it's nothing like Java anyway).
> But ultimately it is up to a judge to decide. Right?
I think we are getting a rude awakening about what is legal versus what is actually right are not always the same thing. There are some the horrible, horrible things here and the laws need updating, as opposed to us simply saying this is for a judge to decide and there is nothing else we can do.
I am ok with ditching the JavaScript name. I understand this cuts the problem entirely. However, there are other problems we have that we can't bypass so easily.
We need copyright terms to be much reduced. We need CFAA fully repealed and not replaced by anything. We need to abolish software patents. There is a lot we need to do that will likely take a century to accomplish and that's likely being too optimistic.
What we can't do is leave everything up to the judges because clearly even if we get a favorable ruling today, the precedent can be removed by another stroke of a pen.
> I think we are getting a rude awakening about what is legal versus what is actually right are not always the same thing.
I'm not sure who "we" are here (Americans perhaps?), but humanity as a whole have known this for a long time, and acted accordingly. This is why presidents in some countries have the right to pardon people, as just one very evident example. That the USA exists as a country today is another example, which at the time when they were trying to create it, was clearly illegal, but since winners write history, still a "good" action.
The the laws aren't 100% unambiguous and strict is also another example, so there is room for interpretation, as something can be "by the book legal" but because of the clear evil motivations and "ignoring the spirit of the law", still be illegal. Of course, highly dependent on the country and lots of counter-examples.
Completely agree. But that's more of a general matter than this specific matter.
Judges is the best we have. US has juries, not sure if that makes it better.
More importantly we need to criminalize lobbying in order to get control back over "our democracies" (what ever that still means today).
But everyone already calls it JS. I think the transition would have been so much easier if the official name started with "J".
Just rename it to "JS" (jay-ess) and forget about having the letters stand for anything.
Would be nice if Microsoft hadn't taken JScript
Microsoft themselves have even suggested the community could take over the name JScript if they want and offered the trademark to community groups.
Or how about just "J", like "C", and "B" before it.
Already taken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)
JECMAScript
JabbaScript
Java no barter
I'm impartial towards JS, but I've heard others call it JunkScript.
JarJarScript.
JSONScript
JuicyScript
Like JunoScript or JangoScript? JavaScript is just very outdated ECMAScript.
Just like SSL vs TLs
soulJaboy Script
How is it outdated?
I guess the argument is that technically JavaScript is still stuck on version 1 or some other low number. The language that has evolved is ECMAScript.
Who are "people"? How would all of this start?
In terms of standard, the specs already use "ECMAScript" and don't even mention JavaScript (https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/), although TC39 website does use it frequently. I guess they could officially recommend people stop using "JavaScript", but I doubt they care.
Otherwise, the petitioner Deno here is only a small part of the ecosystem and barely controls anything (and really nobody other than TC39 controls anything, which is good). They (or anyone else) can't just shout "stop saying JavaScript!" and expect people to follow.
Not to mention JavaScript is a simple, easy to pronounce word compared to ECMAScript despite the baggage, which is probably why they chose it in the first place.
Let's say the "JavaScript" name is officially deprecated somehow. People will continue to use the name for as long as it exists.
So Deno's petition tackles these problems, addresses the root cause and appears to be legally viable. That is the "right thing to do" here. Avoiding the name does not solve the problem. It never does.
What we use nowadays is actually ECMAScript and not JavaScript. We just call it JavaScript.
If enough people call it JavaScript, it is JavaScript. Yes really. Even in a legal sense (and deno are arguing this is already the case).
Our trade has a solid tradition of terrible names for programming languages. They are ALL bad. The whole Ekmuhscrip.js schism fits perfectly. Yes, this is our circus, and these are our monkeys.
> Yes, this is our circus, and these are our monkeys.
In this case, it's Oracle's circus and we are the monkeys.
But some of us get to be pretty looking penguins in this circus of ours.
That’s not retrocompatible with all the .js files out there though.
One possibility is thus just make some vocalic derivation, which align with well known spontaneous evolution of languages like ablaut[1]. Following that, and keeping the dance connotation, jive[2] is an option. Or closer on phonetic distance to java (/ˈd͡ʒɑː.və/), there is jovial (/ˈd͡ʒəʊ.vɪ.əl/ or /ˈd͡ʒoʊ.vɪ.əl/ or /ˈd͡ʒoʊ.vəl/)[3].
Might our jovial·script enjoy our life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jive
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jovial
.js, short for jecmascript, easy
JabbaScript
Would actually paint a very descriptive state about the ecosystem.
Also jiva (/ˈd͡ʒiːvə/) is an option.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jiva
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmO4zvq9HtE
Why not Jayscript?
I see that there's something called that related to javascript already, but like -- very similar spelling, ".js" still works, we lose the Java confusion etc etc.
Half a memory - wasn't the Internet Explorer implementation called JScript?
> people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript
Or go back to calling it “LiveScript”
I'm not changing all the extensions on my files :-)
Just go with the flow - call it js.
EcmaScript just sounds icky.
I still cannot read it without immediately seeing a contraction of eczema.
Yes! I said this same thing in a separate comment! It sounds like Eczema Script
It’s simply not a better name. If it was, it would’ve caught on by now.
No person calls it EcmaScript. They should just call it Jay Es and be done. "JavaScript" is an ugly name too.
I think most of us just call it JS now. And we really write mostly TS anyway.
that would be very culturally/industry specific. Personally, I do call it javascript.
Yeah definitely cultural. IME it's called JS only in chat as a shortcut. IRL people say "javascript"
Switch everything natively to Typescript.
Last phase of embrace, extend, extinguish eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Please. The name JavaScript makes me cringe. We now have something much better in name and functionality, let’s just kill JS.
EcmaScript is a terrible name, there is no way people will call JS that. How do you even pronounce it? What does it mean? What is it?
It’s unfortunate that it sounds like some sort of skin disease.
Apart from anything else, ECMAScript is a mouthful! Eeh-cee-emm-ay-script. Five syllables.
Don't most people just pronounce it Eck-ma?
It should've been called AcmeScript. The association with Wile E. Coyote would've been fitting.
That’s actually the perfect name for it!
Since the association renamed itself to “Ecma International” in 1994, I believe we can just call it Eck-mah-script.
And it sounds like a skin condition.
Flaky when under pressure? Irritating results? Sites look and feel better without it?
Sounds appropriate to me.
It's a genuinely terrible name.
Maybe it should just be pronounced eck-ma-script so it's got the same number of syllables as ja-va-script.
It is pronounced like that, typically
I've only ever heard it pronounced as "EcmaScript" not E-C-M-A Script"
> I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript
Take it to Twitter
Ah yes, "European Computer Manufacturers Association"-script
I'm from the java world and it is basically java. Sure that it can do a lot more, for the most part any java developer will fell at home with the exception of lacking a robust static typing and the IDEs aren't really as good to spot syntax errors. I mean no shade to javascript developers, you just get used to a very robust building environment over there.
Silly question: how are people negatively impacted by the trademark of "JavaScript"?
Because in practice, isn't this a bit like "Kleenex" - where everyone knows you mean "tissue" (EMCAScript).
It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun).
Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.
> Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.
That is why on one level I am surprised by the petition. They are talking to a supercharged litigation monster and are asking it "Dear Oracle, ... We urge you to release the mark into the public domain". You know what a litigation happy behemoth does in that case? It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark. Before they didn't care but now that someone pointed it out, they'll go out of their way to assert their usage of it.
On the other hand, maybe someone there cares about their image and would be happy to improve it in the tech community's eyes...
> It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark.
IANAL, but I don't think that wouldn't be enough to keep the trademark.
Also the petition was a "we'll ask nicely first so we can all avoid the hastle and expense of legal procedings", they are now in the process of getting the trademark invalidated, but Oracle, illogically but perhaps unsurprisingly is fighting it.
I was just using it as an example of doing the absolute minimum. They could write a dumb Javascript debugger or something with minimal effort.
But yeah, IANAL either and just guessing, I just know Oracle is shady and if you challenge them legally they'll throw their weight around. And not sure if responding to a challenge with a new "product" is enough to reset the clock on it. Hopefully a the judge will see through their tricks.
That's why courts don't take hypothetical cases. Someone has to be injured to demonstrate actual harm.
Are there any examples of Oracle using their JavaScript trademark to sue anyone? If they did, that petition would have merit.
Unless Demo was, this feels like a marketing project. And it's working, too, so kudos.
Trademark law is kind of about hypotheticals though. The purpose of a trademark is to prevent theoretical damages from potential confusion, neither of which you ever have to show to be real
In this case the trademark existing and belonging to Oracle is creating more confusion than no trademark existing, so deleting it is morally right. And because Oracle isn't actually enforcing it it is also legally right
Imho this is just the prelude to get better press. "We filed a petition to delete the JavaScript trademark" doesn't sound nearly as good as "We collected 100k signatures for a letter to Oracle and only got silence, now we formally petition the USPTO". It's also a great opportunity to find pro-bono legal council or someone who would help fund the petition
It's the specter of a lawsuit that's the problem.
The other aspect here is that general knowledge (citation needed) says that if a company doesn't actively defend their trademark, they often won't be able to keep it if challenged in court. Or perhaps general knowledge is wrong.
At this point I'm going to assume that adding -Script to a trademarked name allows me to use that name freely.
JavaScriptScript?
JavaScript-Script
Kleenex-Script
Unless that suffixed version is itself already trademarked, like AppleScript.
iPhoneScript should be fine though?
Oracl3Script?
Yeah, that's how I'm going to call my LLM-based law-firm.
Turn it around: Scriptacle.
Assuming Oracle did decide to go down that route, who would they sue? No one really uses the JavaScript name in anything official except for "JavaScriptCore" that Apple ships with Webkit.
Afaik they already sued Deno: https://deno.com/blog/deno-v-oracle2
Edit: Seems I'm incorrect, see below
I had no idea this was a thing! I'm surprised this didn't attract more attention.
My bad, after reading more it seems Deno is trying to get Oracle's trademark revoked, but I found out that "Rust for Javascript" devs have received a cease and desist from Oracle regarding the JS trademark, which may have triggered Deno to go after Oracle.
> who would they sue
Anyone they feel like. Lawnmower gonna mow.
The incredibly litigious company here is Deno. Deno sued on a whim, realized they were massively unprepared, then asked the public to fund a legal campaign that will benefit Deno themselves, a for-profit, VC-backed company.
This personal vendetta will likely end with the community unable to use the term JavaScript. Nobody should support this.
Your comment seems incredibly confused.
1. Oracle is the litigious one here. My favorite example is that time they attacked a professor for publishing less-than-glowing benchmarks of their database: https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/ What's to stop them from suing anyone using the term JavaScript in a way that isn't blessed by them? That's what Deno is trying to protect against.
2. Deno is filing a petition to cancel the trademark, not claim it themselves. This would return it to the public commons.
It should be obvious from these two facts that any member of the public that uses JavaScript should support this, regardless of what they think of Deno-the-company.
> This personal vendetta will likely end with the community unable to use the term JavaScript. Nobody should support this.
Why would that be the case, if not for Oracle's litigiousness?
Hi Larry Ellison! Will you mow my lawn?
The fact that you wrote it wrong is hilariously ironic.
JavaScript is simply the better term, and marketing is everything. Reminds me of Java's POJOs, which was a very simple pattern that no one used, until someone gave them a fancy name.
ECMAScript is a horrible technical name. Might as well call it ACMEScript considering how willie e. coyote it feels to develop with it...
ACME is actually better, because you can say or read it in under 5 business days.
I've heard people say "Eczema Script" in jest.
ECMAScript is a horrible name. It's worse than Google Bard.
it sounds like eczema - naming your programming language after a skin condition is not a great choice
nothing against people with eczema of course
Call it "Jay Ess". Everyone does already.
POJO is one of my favorite acronyms. Along with POTS and COTS.
POTS = Plain Old Telephony System COTS = Commercial Off-The-Shelf
> POTS = Plain Old Telephony System I worked for NY Telephone for years in the '80s, and it was referred to there as "Plain Old Telephone Service" not System. Not that it's a big deal at this point!
I started my career as a telecom tech in the mid Atlantic (late 90's) and can confirm it was that for me too
I was in the ballpark!
My understanding is that the Service was provided by the System.
> Might as well call it ACMEScript considering how willie e. coyote it feels to develop with it...
And it would feel just the same if it was named something else.
It's just a name, who gives a damn?
> It's just a name, who gives a damn?
This is extremely ironic given that JavaScript was so named because people do give a damn about names so Netscape/Sun leveraged the Java success to push JS, hence they named it JAVAscript despite it having nothing to do with Java.
EMCA -> ECMA
True. And that's also a reason why "Javascript" is more human friendly tbh.
One reason it's less friendly is that lots people think it has anything to do with java.
Europe-Canada-Mexico Agreement?
“Easy Cancellation” My Ass
> Because in practice, isn't this a bit like "Kleenex"
Maybe. That's what the challenge intends to find out.
> everyone knows
Not everybody knows. People who learn JavaScript don't know. In fact, they must learn this. And from my experience, most learning resources don't mention this, let alone teach this. It took me a really long time to understand what ECMAScript is and how it relates to JavaScript. And the effort I put in this understanding... I would have preferred to not having needed that.
So no, not everybody knows this.
It’s possible that it also really doesn’t matter that much to the majority of people
ECMAScript:JavaScript :: You-Know-Who:Lord Voldemort
Don't anthropomorphise the lawnmower.
The context:
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
Came here for this. Was not disappoint.
The last time this was brought up, "WebScript" was mentioned as a possible alternative name. (Like WebAssembly, WebSockets, WebRTC, etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45297066
I really like "WebScript" but people will shorten it to "ws", which will make me think of the NPM WebSocket package [0] every time I see it!
[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/ws
WebScript sounds pretty good TBH
As much as I like the idea, it should really be backwards compatible with the JS acronym so that projects like "node.js" or "react.js" make sense.
Great idea. Much better than "ECMAScript"
My personal favourite is "JayScript".
I like it. JSON’s father.
not JScript[0]? or a script written in J[1]?
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)
DoobieScript
I recommend this one
WebScript seems like it would really work. Especially if it was introduced at the same time as a major update to the ECMAscript spec
WebScript is fine by me!
1) Put JS in maintenance mode, don’t add any language features, only runtime
2) TS becomes the official mainline, whoever doesn’t like types can just keep writing as they did before, because valid JS is valid TS
Problem solved, it’s not that difficult.
TS trademark is owned by Microsoft.
That would be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. Not really better.
Call it ES2026 officially and let other people devalue MS' trademark as they refer to that (and later versions) as TS.
...and we'll have another API warfa^H^H^H^H lawsuit that we had for Java.
Wasn't that a copyright issue? I thought the point of contention is that Google allegedly copied Oracle's API design when they re-wrote Java for Android.
Wouldn't Microsoft do the same thing when somebody copies the language and names it "TypedWebBrowserScriptbutFree"?
https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
The license is Apache 2.0. With the trademark, they can tell everyone not to call their thing TypeScript but at this point, given the license, they can't tell them not to copy it and change it and distribute that new thing (assuming the new distributors do so under the correct conditions).
Same as Go and Google then. Is the ownership of the trademark of the name/logo of a FOSS language really that big a deal?
That's the entire issue here: JS is a FOSS language and they don't like that Oracle owns the trademark.
Oops. Outing myself as someone who didn't read TFA.
Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true.
Non-exhaustive examples:
The amount of weird TS I see that attempts to keep the JS style of code while getting the compiler to stop being mad is strange. I will see hundreds of line of type inference work, when they could have just made an actual type.
I feel like most people using TS are not doing it by personal choice but because someone else decided it
I see this happening with people who are thrown in to coding TS, with little or no training / time to educate themselves.
Even syntactically, TS is not a superset of JS: https://anemato.de/blog/js-to-ts
So it's a "sodium chloride" thing. Oh I hit this case too, and even this article looks familiar, probably cause I googled an error message
Or, just delete both and use dart.
ah yes, the regressive approach
3) remove js and its derivatives from the internet, switch to lua or smth
OT, but I learned Lua this year in order to be able to write a mod for a game, and maybe this is due to it being a while since I last used a dynamic language regularly, but Lua really feels like it's basically what JavaScript was intended to be. Both use a map-like data structure for basically everything, with integer keys to make them act like arrays, function values to make them act as objects, but Lua using an explicit function call in `for ... in` loops avoided needing a separate construct to be added later on for iterating over arrays in order (or having to resort to manually iterating over the numbers rather than the array itself). Lua's module system reminds me a lot of how Node's `exports` works (although nowadays I understand there are other ways of importing/exporting stuff in JavaScript), and it's not obvious to me that the power of prototypes in JavaScript are worth the extra complexity over using the module system for the pre-ES6 model of OO that JavaScript used. I feel like Lua basically already has solved most of the stuff that JS has needed to add a lot of new features for in recent years. I imagine this is something that a lot of people were already aware of, but at least personally, even being cognizant of the flaws that JS had been trying to fix, I hadn't realized an already well-established language had a design that solved most of them without also having a lot of additional scope beyond what JS was trying to do (e.g. Python having full-fledged class-based OO) or at least superficially looking a lot different (e.g. some form of lisp, which I know had been at least talked about in the early web days as a potential option but might have faced more of an uphill battle for adoption).
Should be easy, it’s not like there’s any legacy code out there written in JS.
Yes, because that's a pragmatic and realistic solution.
Why is this worth doing? What wrong with the status quo? The author does not give any examples of Oracle threatening people for using the JavaScript (tm) name.
They have linked to an example from one of the blog posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/14vnipl/rust_f...
The example is indeed two years old. I also couldn't find any point in the article that explains why this is worth doing.
But it's a valid example, isn't it?
Someone just wanted to share their Rust + JavaScript knowledge with people, and they got a cease and desist. It's clearly not ideal.
Given they did not change the name, it suggests the legal challenge had failed. So why do we care?
Legal risk alone discourages people. But also, I don't really care.
I think it's mostly a marketing play by Deno.
Yea, Thats what I have also accepted the reason to be.
The problem is FUD. Some guy at a company gets told he has to wait for legal to approve some open source project or initiative that happens to use JS in the name, because his boss heard there’s a trademark issue, and the enthusiasm fades and the idea gets sidelined. There’s probably been thousands of tiny little instances of FUD like that, which we’d never hear about, and which have led to good things not happening.
One clear instance of FUD we do know about is the spec itself is not titled with the name of the language it specifies, which is then its own source of confusion for newcomers trying to learn the web platform, and makes it harder for old timers to explain things, and is generally annoying. Complexity. Confusion. Doubt. Inaction.
Removing legal FUD from the world is a good cause. I don’t mind if it also works as a good marketing play for Deno.
This! I dont think people realize how many people fold like this. Almost nothing actually gets litigated. Litigation is a huge risk and very expensive. The profit incentive at companies means this fight is almost never worth it and its just easier to fold and use a competitor's technology.
Should have [2024]. The "postmark" says Sep 16, 2024.
And the list of updates at the top says they've since filed a petition to dismiss the trademark, and Oracle has filed to dismiss the petition.
I think it is posted because of the update on Dec 2nd 2025 where Oracle responded with a request to dismiss.
Edit: I read that date shockingly wrong, their response was February of 2025 so this is pretty old.
The petition was partially dismissed and Deno was given leave to amend their petition (but no amended petition has yet been filed, that I can see). There was some initial worthless discovery and now a protective order has been granted allowing Oracle to file information they don't want out in public (e.g. trade secrets). That was at the beginning of November 2025 and the case is ongoing.
https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=92086835&pty=CAN&eno...
I wish JavaScript stopped being an abandoned trademark.
monkey paw's finger starts curling
Very quaint that they think they can make some legal argument against Oracle
"If you do not act, we will challenge your ownership by filing a petition for cancellation with the USPTO."
So, just go ahead and do it already. Your cute letter isn't going to change anything.
They already did, a year ago:
https://deno.com/blog/deno-v-oracle
This post is more than a year old.
Let's stop calling it "JavaScript" entirely. "JS" is right there.
Exactly. When was the last time you heard HTML called "HyperText Markup Language"? When was the last time you heard CSS called "Cascading Style Sheets"? We should stop saying "JavaScript" and fully switch to JS.
YavaScript
This is pointless. Oracle is not a democracy, it's a lawnmower.
Well, it's not up to Oracle. It is up to the US government (USPTO).
Which you could make a strong case for also not being a democracy and rather a lawnmower... But I digress.
“I die,” grass
This made me smile way more than it should. Thanks.
Can they drop javascript trademark without threating Java trademark?
I guess that's the main issue. A lot of open source projects fell into this pit, when they put a related trademark into their name. Naming something OpenFastFirefox or iPhoneScript would cause a lot of trademark issues.
How about we stop using Javascript completely or greatly limit its usage. It's time to go back to simple webpages that load instantly on modern hardware and that do not leak information about the user. JS makes it way, way too easy to track people on the Internet as it is.
It's time to rename JavaScript.
Speaking of JavaScript's evolution - I've been building a music player (muz11.com) and it's remarkable how far we've come. The Web Audio API, MediaSession for lock screen controls, smooth animations via requestAnimationFrame... all running client-side with no framework, just vanilla JS. Thirty years ago this would have required a desktop app and probably a record label deal.
The irony is that 'freeing' JavaScript from Oracle's trademark might matter less than freeing ourselves from the framework churn. The platform itself is incredibly capable now.
> Thirty years ago this would have required a desktop app and probably a record label deal.
And that would have been just fine.
Until you have to pay back your advance to the record label.
i wish we instead dropped js for something vastly more sane.
Lua
What would that be?
Something that is designed to be compiled to, so that everyone can use whatever programming language they like.
Seriously JS is the best choice for the things it's commonly used for
Amen to that (will never happen though).
Honest question for companies like Oracle, Google and Microsoft that own the trademark to Javascript, Go and Typescript respectively. What value does it bring to these companies to own these trademarks?
The only case I can really see is someone going off and creating another language and then proceeding to call it, Javascript, Typscript or Go and then using the same logo but I feel at that point the developer community would be pretty effective in sorting that out without getting lawyers involved.
Well, look at how Microsoft tried to hijack the JVM back in the 90s. I think the big fear is that somebody creates a "mostly compatible" product, that in fact isn't 100% compatible, and tries to market it as the same thing as the original, which in fact isn't the original.
Based on the link someone put in a different comment about them suing Deno, at least in Oracle's case the answer is presumably "being able to sue people and get money from them".
Even if that weren't the case though, I think part of the problem is that even if the trademarks literally never brings any value, it also potentially costs them nothing to retain them (unless someone tries to get it invalidated, at which point there's some cost to trying to defend it). Arguably the cost to establish in the trademark in the first place is also low enough that companies at that scale don't have much incentive notto establish them in the first piece; they already have lawyers and trademarking things isn't really out of the ordinary for them, so the marginal cost of having them file one more isn't very high.
It's worth considering whether the point you make about there not being much of a realistic concern around someone else attempting to copy the name is something that would be obvious to non-developers. Sometimes what might be obvious to a developer might not be obvious to a lawyer, and at the end of the day, the legal team is probably in charge of deciding things like this at these companies, so in the absence of pressure from someone who understands this point enough influence to make it happen (like maybe a C-level exec), it might not matter that the concern is realistic if it's theoretically plausible.
This is a very weak letter. Oracle is using the mark in commerce, and the 2019 specimen is presumed valid unless affirmatively disproven. The fact that Oracle doesn’t charge licensing fees for use of the name is irrelevant. Calling something JavaScript ‘JavaScript’ is nominative use, and any attempt by Oracle to enforce against such truthful descriptive use would fail under nominative fair use.
Let’s call it JoyScript so it still shortens to JS. And so at least the name as some joy in it even if the language doesn’t.
Maybe it's also time to find a better alternative, untrademarked name than Eczema Script.
It may have been a mistake to specify a name that can be trademarked in the first place.
They thought of that and called the spec ECMAScript instead.
Oh, this reminds me of the horror days when Oracle deliberately rolled out spyware (Ask Toolbar) in the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installer, that corporate admins and developers/testers inadvertently installed on millions of PCs.
Oracle never apologised for this sudden hijack (of an executable that was trusted and used by millions of IT people) and malicious behavior (no prior information given by Oracle for this malpractice), if I recall right.
I am sure that disaster was a wake up call for many developers and corporations to move away from Java dependency.
While I completely agree with the sentiment, there are 100 million reasons why it will never happen. Having dealt with Oracle for over 20 years, I have seen their predatory relationship with their customers. They will hold onto this trademark in the hope that they can somehow monetize it.
At some point they will approach companies, likely tech companies that produce a product or offering that can't be described without using the word "JavaScript". They will offer a "convenient" licensing agreement of $50,000 per year for the use of their trademark.
They used this playbook with Java, an easier path because they had something more substantial than a trademark, but the approach will be the same. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/165kzxg/oraclejav...
As Oracle's debt problems mount, the company seems increasingly likely to weaponize this trademark against companies—despite otherwise showing little interest in the word. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/w...
honourable of an idea as this is: "When its use has been discontinued with intent not to resume such us"
you will never ever be able to prove no intent to resume and as such the entire effort is beyond pointless
I'd rather start a completely new, better language for the browser.
Like Dart and the Dartium browser
I'm sad every day that Dart didn't get bigger than it is. It's really a great language. Compiles to AOT too.
I know, it's underrated but it is what it is. I still continue using it.
Dart looks ok, but looking at the Dart equivalents of JS examples like {foo: 1}, I'd rather use JS
There is sadly no equivalent to {foo: 1} in Dart. This difference stems from Darts class based object model while JSs is, as you probably know, prototype based
That's my issue with this, I like the prototype system. It's very convenient for this kind of use case.
:o has anyone thought of this before? /s
Imagine if this effort was spent on solving more pressing problems, like the recent yet another security kerfuffle, or the overloaded maintainers whom everyone depends on but reliably fails to support.
Call the language JS, everyone already understands it, it's used on all the logos because it's short, we already another popular language with a very compact name (Go, which is harder to look up without mangling its name, and it's still doing fine).
Whether the JS community can organize to address those issues may in fact depend on the real and social capital that this seemingly auxiliary campaign has the opportunity to effect.
> Go, which is harder to look up without mangling its name
don't get me started on typescript. Until recently I had to use its full name when googling something
exactly, just a whole lot of haters got nothing better to do.
>Imagine if this effort was spent on solving more pressing problems,
Are you suggesting that Ryan Dahl's contribution has been less than satisfactory so far?
Does anyone think they actually sent them a letter? Which has the greatest likelihood of being read by capable eyes? The letter or the web page?
Deno is very good at marketing: they also have a nice page about the history of JS.
But just like with this JS trademark thing, it feels like they present themselves as spokespeople and spearhead for the whole JS community, which feels kind of misleading and grandiose.
The mentioned timeline site (link below) also has this issue: it slowly shifts focus from things like the first JS version, the creation of XMLHttpRequest, to later focusing on Deno milestones, as if these events would have had comparable impacts:
https://deno.com/blog/history-of-javascript
And that seems kind of dishonest and designed to nudge outsiders towards thinking Deno would be the default server runtime now, which doesn't seem to be true.
the og lang should have been named coffeescript. Then the coffeescript in our universe could have been named javascript, until better tooling and improvements to the coffeescript spec became implemented by popular browsers.
The Oracle Org Chart by Manu Cornet springs to mind reading this: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
Actual title: "Oracle, It's time to free Javascript"
Lets all call it ECMAScript instead.
Just call it JS and make the trademark forgotten.
Anyone reasonable would agree that Oracle does not even gain anything for their products by holding the trademark. They have zero benefit, except of course occasional bullying.
Don't underestimate the benefits of the power of bullying. Just look at the current US administration.
This looks to me that Deno folks are out of business options and decided to create a distraction instead, of selling us why to use Deno instead of nodejs.
Seems sensible to me, Oracle doesn't seem to use the trademark.
But also, what are the consequences of Oracle having the trademark, why is this an issue?
Official name is ECMAScript. Maybe it's time to drop "Javascript".
Why in 2025 can we not ship a statically typed high performance language for browsers?
Because every time someone proposes it the immediate follow up is “which language?”, which everyone argues about until they’re exhausted and give up.
Which is why WebAssembly is the right answer.
Rust runs quite well today via WebAssembly. Continuing to improve interop between Web API / WASM / language runtimes seems like a good route that allows people to use the language they prefer against shared Web APIs.
I'm a huge fan of statically typed languages, but shipping statically typed code as an artifact seems like it loses all of the advantages.
What does it matter to the user whether they get a runtime or a "compile time" error in their invisible devtools console? To them, the page simply doesn't work.
Static languages make sense when compilation happens at dev-time, where the actual devs can respond to the diagnostics. So it's far better to develop in a statically typed language, compile it ahead of time and ship that to the user. Which is exactly what people do now with wasm.
Dart is a statically typed high performance language intended for the browser. For a short time you could run Dart in the Chrome browser - as a JavaScript alternative. They then decided it was better to transpile to JS... JavaScript is already strictly typed and safe, but the dynamic nature makes it difficult to optimize. So I think it's a weird decision to transpile to JS.
Because there is no consensus on what that should be, and vendors have so little motivation they just outsource most browser development to Google.
> Why in 2025 can we not ship a statically typed high performance language for browsers?
Which one?
Developers always on their high horse, if after years of trying different options it didnt happen, maybe that means it's not what the world wants or need?
I don't want static typing in a web language. This is something people getting dragged from Java and C++ want. JS and Py got popular without it.
Also there's TS if you really want it
$43k of $200k.
It's time for browsers to just consume typescript
Rename it as "Jotascript". (Jot-a-script).
Or just JotScript.
javascripts a silly Name
OK we'll change it then. Hello, CliffRichardScript
Here we go again
Important to remember Oracle is one of the most evil tech companies, and Larry Ellison is your prototypical evil villain. Oracle CEO Catz recently said "We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none" and "if they don't agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren't the right company for them".
I've said it before, I'll say it again. We should just stop using the term JavaScript. It's a bad choice of name and always has been.
It's caused way too much confusion over the years making people wrongly associate it with Java. My guess would be that associations exactly why Oracle doesn't want to give it up.
I would like to say go back to the original name of LiveScript from before Netscape tried to woo Sun, but the name LiveScript has been co-opted.
Something else with a J would probably be the least painful. JScript is permanently associated with Microsoft's terrible IE implementation. I offer up "JaScript" as it sounds largely like JavaScript but said with a drawl while retaining "JS".
Heck, I'll call it ECMAScript if that's what it takes. I'd rather not, but it's better than "JavaScript"
This has so many unintended consequences for LLM over the next four years I would think.
"JavaScript" tokenizes to 2 tokens (BPE). "ECMAScript" tokenizes to 3. No biggie here.
But the real cost isn't training—it's inference. Every time an LLM has to reconcile "ES6" with "JavaScript," explain the naming, or reason through "user said JavaScript but docs say ECMAScript"— Hidden chain-of-thought overhead. Clarification tokens.
Back of envelope: ~376M JS-related LLM queries/day globally. ~30% trigger some clarification overhead. That's ~5B extra tokens/day, ~1.85T tokens/year.
At ~0.000025 kWh/token inference cost, that's ~46 GWh/year.
~23,000 tonnes CO2 annually. ~200,000 tonnes over 4 years, based on rough growth of LLM use, and terms sticking around on both names over 4 years - probably wrong here too.
Sources
Token counts: OpenAI tiktoken cl100k_base encoder 2.5B ChatGPT queries/day: Sam Altman, July 2025 [1] ~4.7B total LLM interactions/day: aggregated from ChatGPT + Gemini (2B monthly AI Overviews users) + Copilot + Claude + others [2][3] JS = 62% of developers: Stack Overflow 2024 Survey [4] 8% of queries JS-related: my estimate based on language prevalence 30% clarification rate: my estimate - probably way off Energy/token: ~0.000025 kWh blended from Luccioni et al. and Patterson et al. inference estimates [5]
CO2: 0.5 kg/kWh global grid average
[1] techcrunch.com/2025/07/21/chatgpt-users-send-2-5-billion-prompts-a-day [2] demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics [3] sqmagazine.co.uk/chatgpt-vs-google-gemini-statistics [4] survey.stackoverflow.co/2024 [5] arxiv.org/pdf/2211.02001 (BLOOM carbon footprint paper)