> We don't ask ourselves that of websites or apps To be fair, yes we do. Most websites and apps have an additional advantage of not necessarily caring about b

> We don't ask ourselves that of websites or apps To be fair, yes we do. Most websites and apps have an additional advantage of not necessarily caring about backwards compatibility over decades and can cut out features that don't work out or are obsolete, something that may never be possible with JavaScript. And, just like languages, apps that do become lumbering beasts are often abandoned for rewrites or new apps with similar functionality but streamlined of all that historical baggage. > why would we ask it of programming languages? TC39 member Mark S Miller answered this question well in "The Tragedy of the Common Lisp, or, Why Large Languages Explode" https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2015-June/043307.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2015-June/0433... There is definitely a balance, but any language ignores this question at its peril.