Brendan Eich (; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to controversy over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the CEO of Brave Software. Early life Eich grew up in Pittsburgh; Gaithersburg, Maryland; and Palo Alto, and he attended Ellwood P. Cubberley High School, graduating in the class of 1979. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University, and he received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Eich is Roman Catholic. He began his career at Silicon Graphics, working for seven years on operating system and network code. He then worked for three years at MicroUnity Systems Engineering writing microkernel and DSP code. Career Netscape Eich started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995. Eich originally joined intending to put Scheme "in the browser", but his Netscape superiors insisted that the language's syntax resemble that of Java. As a result, Eich devised a language that had much of the functionality of Scheme, the object-orientation of Self, and the syntax of Java. He completed the first version in ten days in order to accommodate the Navigator 2.0 Beta release schedule, and was called Mocha, but renamed LiveScript in September 1995 and finally in a joint announcement with Sun Microsystems it was named JavaScript in December. Simultaneously, he designed the first SpiderMonkey engine for the Netscape Navigator browser at Netscape Communications. When Mozilla inherited the Netscape base code in 1998, it included this engine, which was written in the C programming language. It was then changed in JavaScript 1.5 to comply with the ECMA-262 standard. Eich continued to oversee the development of SpiderMonkey, the specific implementation of JavaScript in Navigator. Mozilla In early 1998, Eich co-founded the free and open source software project Mozilla with Jamie Zawinski and others, creating the mozilla.org website, which was meant to manage open-source contributions to the Netscape source code. He served as Mozilla's chief architect. AOL bought Netscape in 1999. After AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. In August 2005, after serving as a