[djtriptych]

To be fair, now that almost all professionally-written passes through a rewriting compiler, Javascript actually has evolved to a ecosystem that _can_ handle rapid (non-breaking) changes to a language spec.

I'd also argue that the majority of these changes are to the standard library (new methods on String, Array, RegExp, etc). Not really core language changes. I don't know how often the go libs update but surely faster than the language spec?

[avgcorrection]

> To be fair, now that almost all professionally-written passes through a rewriting compiler,

What?

[HeavyFeather]

They're likely referring to Babel and TypeScript. In short, it doesn't matter what you're writing as long as your transpiler has the right `target` so it works in older browsers/engines too.

[bitwize]

There are popular JavaScript tools that nearly everyone uses, that reimplement Lisp poorly by source-to-source compiling stuff written against the latest new hotness spec into something that can be run by some old-and-busted JavaScript runtime (e.g., in browsers).

In fact this is how TypeScript is implemented.

[Dylan16807]

A pass to strip some type annotations isn't a poor reimplementation of Lisp, jeez.

I know the quote you're referring to but you're stretching a mile to get there.

[djtriptych]

To add the above - I also meant to write "Professionally-written Javascript" in case it was the grammar that threw you off. Sorry!

[avgcorrection]

Thanks. :) Wasn’t able to fill in the dropped word.