[musicale]

> Fun fact: code written in JavaScript in 1995 will work in 2021, after 26 years.

Sure, as long as you run it in Netscape Navigator 2.0.

In 2021 you're lucky if a JavaScript web app that worked fine on Tuesday still works on Wednesday. And shocked if it works in any browser other than Chrome.

[Ginden]

It's plainly untrue. I worked on ECMAScript proposals and TC39 takes backwards compatibility really seriously.

Browsers too take backwards compatibility very seriously and features stop working almost only if these are serious security holes.

[musicale]

You're right about backward compatibility - and yet so many things break anyway. And many web apps of the past only worked on Internet Explorer (much in the way that modern web apps only work on Chrome.)

However, the thing that broke Tuesday's app on Wednesday was probably a library or framework change.

[lostcolony]

That's the DOM manipulation and browser behaviors, not Javascript itself.

[kwhitefoot]

If you divorce JavaScript from the Dom you have removed it's entire reason for existence. So the dom is effectively part of the language. Just as the standard library is effectively part of C or Nim, etc. Without them they are considerably less useful.

[lostcolony]

You remove the reason -for its creation-. Not its reason for existence; Node is a thing, and doesn't touch the DOM. So, no, it's not effectively part of the language.