[andreyf]

They never had anything to do with one another

Not completely true... The X in XHR stands for XML, as that's what it parses natively [1], whereas parsing JSON wasn't native until relatively recently. JavaScript had Java's syntax. Not sure about hamsters and ham...

1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534370(VS.85).aspx

[blasdel]

From your link: "responseXML was introduced in Windows Internet Explorer 7" - in October 2006. XHR was first shipped with Internet Explorer 5 - in March 1999!

JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks.

Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).

[andreyf]

Yeah... giving them the benefit of the doubt, that's misleading wording: XMLHttpRequest is an object in the JS namespace as of IE7. Before that, you needed to import an ActiveX Object, which has supported requestXML since MSXML 2.0 (that's IE5). See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms757066(VS.85).aspx