A thousand years ago, Erik the Red names Greenland "Greenland" (even though it's icy) to trick travellers into coming there.

LiveScript was renamed to JavaScript for similar reasons.

Why Iceland green then

@miladiashe iceland was already taken and I guess they wanted greenland to be in front of iceland. Not many colors start with an 'H' so green it is.

@miladiashe That's a long time since. In Iceland, they just put body{color:green} in the CSS of Iceland, and that worked because they were using Internet Explorer 3. They planned to do the same in Greenland, hence the optimistic name - only that they were on Netscape 3 there, without CSS support.