It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, an engineer at Netscape, and first released with Netscape 2 early in 1996. It was originally going to be called LiveScript, but was renamed in an ill-fated marketing decision to try to capitalise on the popularity of Sun Microsystem's Java language — despite the two having very little in common. This has been a source of confusion ever since.