Using the Lindy Effect for guidance, I've built a stack/framework that works across 20 years of different versions of these languages, which increases the chances of it continuing to work without breaking changes for another 20 years.

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The reason that Blender grew from being an inside joke to a real contender is the painful re-factoring it underwent between 2009 and 2011.

In contrast, I can feel the fact that the code in After Effects is now over 30 years old. Its native tracker is slow and ancient and not viable for anything but the most simple of tasks. Tracking was 'improved' by sub-contracting the task to a sub-licensed version of Mocha via a truly inelegant integration hack.

There is so much to be said for throwing everything away and starting again, like Apple successfully did with OSX (and Steve Job did to his own career when he left Apple to start Next). However, I also remember how Blackberry tried something similar and in the process lost most of their voodoo.

Have we already passed the era of DON'T BREAK USERSPACE when Linus would famously loudly berate anyone who did?

I suspect Win32 is still a good target for stability; I have various tiny utilities written decades ago that still work on Win11. With the continued degradation of Microsoft, at least there is WINE.

Unpopular targets, platforms, languages, etc don't get changed and provide a much needed refuge. There are some interpreted languages like perl where a program written today could run on a perl from 2001 and a program from 2001 would run on perl today. And I'm not talking about in a container or with some special version. I'm talking about the system perl.

Some popular languages these days can lose forwards compatibility (gain features, etc) within just a few months that every dev will use within a few more months. In these cultures sofware rot is really fast.