Short answers, pulled from the story.
JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich in 1995 while he was working at Netscape. It first shipped as part of a Navigator beta in September 1995 under the name LiveScript, and was renamed JavaScript for its official release in December 1995.
JavaScript and Java are distinct languages that share a C-like syntax and some naming conventions but differ greatly in design. Java uses static typing and loads from compiled bytecode, while JavaScript uses dynamic typing and loads as human-readable source code. Java did not support functional programming until Java 8; JavaScript has supported it from the start.
Oracle Corporation owns the JavaScript trademark in the United States. Sun Microsystems originally received the trademark on the 6th of May 1997, and Oracle inherited it when it acquired Sun in 2009. A 2024 letter signed by over 14,000 people, including Brendan Eich, called on Oracle to free the trademark.
ECMAScript is the official language specification that JavaScript conforms to. Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International in November 1996 as the basis for a shared standard, and the first ECMAScript specification was released in June 1997. The specification is maintained by Ecma International's TC39 technical committee.
Node.js is a standalone runtime for JavaScript outside the browser, created by Ryan Dahl in 2009. It combines the V8 JavaScript engine with an event loop and I/O APIs. By 2018, it had been used by millions of developers, and npm, its package manager, had the most modules of any package manager in the world.
As of 2025, JavaScript is the most widely used programming language on GitHub. It is used by 98.9% of websites for client-side behavior, and over 80% of websites use at least one third-party JavaScript library or framework.