JavaScript's Marketing Trick
Share
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."
Guillermo Rauch
CEO and founder of Vercel, creator of Socket.IO
Guillermo Rauch is an Argentine-born software engineer and entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Vercel (originally ZEIT, founded 2015), a cloud application company that created and maintains the Next.js web development framework. Before Vercel, he created Socket.IO, the widely-used real-time event-driven JavaScript communication library. Vercel raised $250 million in a Series E round in May 2024 at a $3.25 billion valuation and is also the maker of the v0 AI web development tool and the AI SDK.