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Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

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Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#121
post #119
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is GraalJS a fork of Node.js? Because I doubt Ry would write this article if he was one of the top contributors to GraalJS which is what this graph says: https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/graphs/contributors

Must be a fork because I found my own commits haha https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/commits?author=styfle

No, not really a fork. GraalJS is a new independent from-scratch implementation of JavaScript. It uses a pair of radically different execution and optimisation techniques known as self-specialising-ASTs, and partial evaluation, and runs on the JVM.

But a sibling project, Graal-Node.js, does include vendored code from Node.js in order to be compatible with Node.js applications. That's where the commits come from I'd guess.

Compare:

https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-js

https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-nodejs

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#122
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe ECMAScript is the specification of which JavaScript is an implementation.

I always have had problem with this definition... what do you mean by "implementation"? in my head "implementations" are "programs". Like... "C" is a specification, "gcc" is an implementation. "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy", ... are implementations. "ECMAScript" is a specification, "webkit", "spidermonkey", ... are implementations. "JavaScript" is a (trademarked) specification, and also "ECMAScript" a…

> "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy"

Is Python-the-language fully specified now? Of course there are now a lot of PEPs, but I seem to recall (way back then, even before PEP3000 was a thing) that the Python "spec" was largely the "CPython" implementation (incl. bugs and all), and "CPython" was not actually a real name but emerged from a need to distinguish the original Python implementation from "Python-the-language" as well as alternative implementations such as PyPy, JPython/Jython, IronPython...

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#123
post #112

> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill. Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.

They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#124
post #12

Can’t you just call it ECMAScript, or are they somehow different these days? Guy Steele told me once that Sun registered it with ECMA so they could tell people (governments?) that it was a registered standard and that ECMA was the easiest/fastest/most compliant way to get there. I’d always thought that ECMA was a weird place to register it.

Why not just call it 'JS'?

JS doesn't have to stand for anything. It's just 'JS', pronounced jay-ess.

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#125
post #112

> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill. Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.

They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.

A business still needs to hire people to work on Oracle db. At my company they have trouble hiring for it. They resort to shared service orgs to provide DBA services. That means one DBA per 10-100 application developers. It’s awful. We do anything to avoid oracle because we can’t get a DBA to help us. Even use hadoop hive for non hive use cases.

I guess my point is that these struggles eventually do reach the leaders and they choose something else. We moved off teradata because of shared service orgs so we'll probably leave this type of oracle at some point too. Either a completely self service option of oracle or an open source one.

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#126
post #112

> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill. Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.

They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.

> They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.

I'm gonna bet the managers didn't ask because they knew what the immediate answer would be

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#127

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmo…

Just to clarify: I've always thought this quote was funny, but my point is that if you want Oracle to do this, you'll have to give them a good reason. They can't spend good will.

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#128
post #112

> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill. Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.

They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.

For large corporations and gov organisations I can see how that could plausibly be true... for everything else, not so much. At smaller companies the hierarchy is not so rigid or deep, and people are not so siloed, they must work together more closely and feel each others pain.

I'm a dev at a such a small company, and in a position that I can make or highly influence such decisions. Oracle products will never be in our supply chain because of me - a dev.

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#129

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmo…

Never gets old... :-)

"...I am going to try to make through this slide without crying..."

"...and by the way not to put too sharp a point on this..."

Re: Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

#130
There seems to be some confusion in the comments.

The language is called JavaScript. It was temporarily called other things including LiveScript during early development. It was developed at Netscape to be the scripting language for Netscape's browser and server (yes, you read that right). It was also the basis for a proposed competitor to CSS called JavaScript Style Sheets only ever supported by Netscape 4.

The trademark to the name was held by Sun prior to its acquisition by Oracle. The existence of the trademark led to Microsoft calling their reverse engineered implementation of the language "JScript". In order to avoid fragmentation via incompatible implementations Netscape published an official language spec with ECMA, an international standards organization similar to ISO. Because the specification could not use the trademarked name this led to the name "ECMAScript" which the official specifications have used ever since.

ECMAScript 3 is also the basis for ActionScript 2 used in Flash by Macromedia/Adobe, which is not fully compatible with JavaScript. ActionScript 3 was heavily influenced by the proposed ECMAScript 4, which was eventually scrapped because it tried to do too many things at once (while also intentionally being backwars-incompatible) and none of the companies involved at that point could agree on anything. This led to the heavily downscaled ECMAScript 5 release as a compromise until 2005 when ECMAScript 6 started the current model of yearly releases by defining a multi-stage process for new language features.

The obvious question is why it was called JavaScript to begin with. Again, there are many wrong answers in the comments. The generally accepted history is that Sun and Netscape wanted to cooperate to bring Java into Netscape as the new universal language for applications. Java was already going to be available for cross-platform desktop applications (and later for embedded applications like on feature phones) and Java applets were supposed to bring it to the browser.

According to various people involved at the time, Netscape's own scripting language was considered a problem by Sun so in order to avoid competing with Java, JavaScript received its final name in order to be rebranded as a "light-weight scripting language" alongside the "serious application development language" of Java.

It's also worth mentioning that JavaScript in the browser not only consists of the ECMAScript spec but also the DOM APIs, which were originally written in a language agnostic way because there was no consensus for what the default language for accessing these APIs would be. In addition to JavaScript and JScript, Microsoft also pushed VBScript (based on Visual Basic) and there were some attempts to let Java access the DOM APIs from within the JVM.

With Java applets being mostly dead and JavaScript having survived all other browser scripting languages, DOM spec writers have recently moved to considering JavaScript as the primary implementation language and mapping their implementation agnostic pseudo-language to JavaScript language features explicitly. This should hopefully reduce the number of language quirks in future web APIs (like the various native "list" types that don't quite behave like JavaScript arrays or `document.all` being falsey).

So in short, JavaScript is called Java so not to compete with Java for "serious browser applications" in the 1990s and ECMAScript is originally a subset of Netscape's (and later Mozilla's) JavaScript although JavaScript has since shrunk and ECMAScript expanded (e.g. JS's `let` and `const` outside strict mode have been superceded by ECMAScript's more recent `let` and `const` in strict mode) to the point that both terms are used interchangeably regardless of the runtime environment.

If you're wondering why Netscape went with ECMA of all places instead of something more obvious: neither the IETF nor W3C wanted to get involved in programming language specifications at the time and the ISO process took too long but there was a way to fast-track ECMA standards to ISO standards. Remember that this all happened during the peak of the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, so this was the only thing that mattered at the time.

If you want to learn more about the early history of JavaScript I'd suggest reading Brendan Eich's written history of it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327

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