As Douglas Crockford has said, javascript is Lisp is C's clothing. That is part of what make javascript fun to program, but I never realized how literally true that statement is until I found this fascinating article by Thomas Lord about GNU and Scheme, that claims:
I've read, since then, that up to around that point Brendan Eich had been working on a Scheme-based extension language for Netscape Navigator. Such was the power of the hegemony of the high level folks at Sun that the word came down on Mr. Eich: "Get it done. And make it look like Java." Staying true to his sense of Self, he quickly knocked out the first implementation of Mocha, later renamed Javascript.
Explains a lot. And shows what an under-appreciated genius Brendan Eich is.
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