JavaScript's Marketing Trick

Guillermo Rauch explains how JavaScript got its name as a marketing tactic.

"The reason it's called JavaScript is they needed to market it as Java - they just added 'script.' There's no relation whatsoever between those two things. Brandon Eich always says that it took him ten days to conceive the language, primarily because of deadlines. Marc Andreessen wanted to pitch that - one of the initial names was LiveScript, and then they renamed it to JavaScript to market it more like the enterprise traction.

To use the evolution example, it's like skin color blended in with the trees - JavaScript just blended in with Java. That gave it an evolutionary advantage versus getting eaten because it stands out. It was like they were trying to call things 'agents' today when perhaps they're not agents - here we go."