Eich: Evolutionary forces mandate backwards compatibility across the web
Brendan Eich · The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired · Feb 15, 2022 · at 11:22
Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and CEO of Brave, discusses how the structural requirement for backwards compatibility prevents rapid architectural changes to core web protocols.
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“So there's this strong evolutionary Force, this gradient forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate because it means you really can't make incompatible changes except very slowly or through new runtimes that you can download.”
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