Is this language related to Java? Is it only the script form for Java? Is it only for writing scripts and not real programs?

The truth is, the name JavaScript is an artifact of marketing shenanigans. When Brendan Eich first conceived of the language, he code-named it Mocha. Internally at Netscape, the brand LiveScript was used. But when it came time to publicly name the language, “JavaScript” won the vote.

Why? Because this language was originally designed to appeal to an audience of mostly Java programmers, and because the word “script” was popular at the time to refer to lightweight programs. These lightweight “scripts” would be the first ones to embed inside of pages on this new thing called the web!

There are some superficial resemblances between JavaScript’s code and Java code. Those similarities don’t particularly come from shared development, but from both languages targeting developers with assumed syntax expectations from C (and to an extent, C++).

For example, we use the to begin a block of code and the to end that block of code, just like C/C++ and Java. We also use the to punctuate the end of a statement.

In some ways, legal relationships run even deeper than the syntax. Oracle (via Sun), the company that still owns and runs Java, also owns the official trademark for the name “JavaScript” (via Netscape). This trademark is almost never enforced, and likely couldn’t be at this point.

Further distancing the language from the Oracle-owned trademark, the official name of the language specified by TC39 and formalized by the ECMA standards body is ECMAScript. And indeed, since 2016, the official language name has also been suffixed by the revision year; as of this writing, that’s ECMAScript 2019, or otherwise abbreviated ES2019.

In other words, the JavaScript/JS that runs in your browser or in Node.js, is an implementation of the ES2019 standard.

Whether you call it JavaScript, JS, ECMAScript, or ES2019, it’s most definitely not a variant of the Java language!