A language written in ten days under deadline pressure at a browser company in 1995 — and, three decades later, still the only language every browser on Earth runs natively.
Netscape needed a scripting language to make web pages dynamic, and gave Brendan Eich ten days to build one in May 1995. He drew on Scheme for first-class functions, Self for prototype-based inheritance, and Java for surface syntax — a marketing decision more than a technical one, since the name itself came from a licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems, not any deep kinship with the Java language. It was called Mocha, then LiveScript, before shipping as JavaScript.
Unlike Python, there’s no clean peer-reviewed literature to cite on JavaScript’s own history — it’s a case where the primary sources are the language’s creator’s own retrospective accounts and contemporaneous industry reporting, not academic study. Worth being honest about that rather than reaching for an adjacent paper just to appear more rigorous.