A little bit of history
In 1993, the Mosaic browser of National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) was one of the first popular web browsers. A year later, Netscape Communications created the proprietary web browser, Netscape Navigator. Several original Mosaic authors worked on Navigator.
In 1995, Netscape Communications hired Brendan Eich with the promise of letting him implement Scheme (a Lisp dialect) in the browser. Before this happened, Netscape got in touch with Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) to include Java in the Navigator browser.
Due to the popularity and easy programming of Java, Netscape decided that a scripting language had to have a syntax similar to that of Java. This ruled out adopting existing languages such as Python, Tool Command Language (TCL), or Scheme. Eich wrote the initial prototype in just 10 days (http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/2012/02/mco2012020007.pdf), in May 1995. JavaScript's first code name was Mocha, coined by Marc Andreessen. Netscape later changed it to LiveScript, for trademark reasons. In early December 1995, Sun licensed the trademark Java to Netscape. The language was renamed to its final name, JavaScript.
