No, it has no relation to Java (poor naming convention but we have to live with it). Created in 1995, JavaScript has gone a very long way since its humble beginnings. It was the first scripting language that was supported natively by web browsers, and thanks to this it gained a competitive advantage over any other language and today it's still the only scripting language that we can use to build Web Applications.

Other languages exist, but all must compile to JavaScript - or more recently to WebAssembly (WebAssembly (Wasm) is a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that can be executed in modern web browsers. It is designed to run with near-native performance and serves as a compilation target for languages such as C, C++, C#, and Rust, enabling them to run on the web), but this is another story.

In the beginning, JavaScript was not nearly as powerful as it is today, and it was mainly used for fancy animations and the marvel known at the time as Dynamic HTML. With the growing needs that the web platform demanded (and continues to demand), JavaScript had the responsibility to grow as well, to accommodate the needs of one of the most widely used ecosystems of the world. JavaScript is now widely used also outside of the browser. The rise of Node.js in the last few years unlocked backend development, once the domain of Java, Ruby, Python, PHP and more traditional server-side languages. JavaScript is now also the language powering databases and many more applications, and it's even possible to develop embedded applications, mobile apps, TV sets apps and much more. What started as a tiny language inside the browser is now the most popular language in the world.

FACT: Sometimes it's hard to separate JavaScript from the features of the environment it is used in. For example, the console.log() line you can find in many code examples is not JavaScript. Instead, it's part of the vast library of APIs provided to us in the browser. In the same way, on the server, it can be sometimes hard to separate the JavaScript language features from the APIs provided by Node.js :)