Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript, the scripting language of the web browser. He completed his master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985 and went on to work at Silicon Graphics and the startup MicroUnity before joining Netscape Communications Corporation on April 3, 1995. In his own account he recalls that he “was recruited to Netscape with the promise of ‘doing Scheme’ in the browser.”
His Netscape managers had a different plan. As Eich tells it, upper engineering management insisted the new language “look like Java,” which ruled out the Scheme, Perl, Python, and Tcl alternatives he had considered. Under intense time pressure, he prototyped the first version of the language, code-named Mocha, in about ten days in May 1995. The detailed history “JavaScript: The First 20 Years,” which Eich co-wrote with Allen Wirfs-Brock, records that he “prototyped the first Mocha implementation in ten contiguous days in May, 1995.”
The language shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0, first under the name LiveScript and then, after a joint Netscape and Sun Microsystems press release on December 4, 1995, under the name JavaScript. Within a few years it was standardized by Ecma International as ECMAScript, and it became one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.
After Netscape, Eich helped found the Mozilla project and was later chief technology officer and briefly chief executive of the Mozilla Corporation, the organization behind the Firefox browser. He went on to co-found Brave Software, maker of the privacy-focused Brave web browser.