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Comment by gear54rus | Hacker News Reader

For the life of me I just can't fucking understand what did we gain from this website in this fairy tale.

Who ever thought future progress can be sacrificed just so that some obscure website (obscure because it is no longer supported, people no longer care) can work for 22 years during which the world has changed so much that this website is probably no longer relevant under any objective measure.

I mean yes, maintain SOME backward compatibility but dragging bs like typeof null === 'object' all along is just nuts.

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Imagine if books became unreadable the day the author died.

Some people care about books, even books written by people long dead. And some people care about the content on some older websites, even if they are not using the newest flashy framework.

As developers, we hate the demands of legacy code and backward compatibility. We would like to scrap everything and rewrite in the cool new language and framework every few years. But a browser is not only a fun playground for developers. It is a tool for accessing information for people who couldn't care less about what an identifier is called in JavaScript. They just want it to work.

Imagine if people left books to rot in a garbage dump rather than taking care of them.

This is where the analogy to books breaks down. If you have a book you care about you can take care of it. If you care about some website where the owner is long dead, there is probably nothing you can do to maintain it, except keep using a backwards compatible browser.

>Who ever thought future progress can be sacrificed just so that some obscure website (obscure because it is no longer supported, people no longer care) can work for 22 years during which the world has changed so much that this website is probably no longer relevant under any objective measure.

The alternative would to design the web so that only popular and "relevant" sites can expect to be viewable in the future, and to arbitrarily break everything else. But the web isn't (or shouldn't be) structurally biased towards the size or traffic of a few specific sites, and an obscure decades old site no one cares about has just as much of a right to remain functional as any other.

I don't see the point either, a good backward compatibility is useful but a 100% backward compatibility even with unspecified behaviour is a recipe for disaster.

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