I think this answer is the second derivative.

Maybe it depends on who are you are targeting with the course. If it's someone who is just graduating from using a browser to writing something in the browser; the student will be completely lost. If it's someone who has most of an undergraduate CS education, including a course on compilers; you are fine.

I'm teaching an introductory course on web tech right now at Ashesi University; and while my students have been programming in python for a while; have taken data structures your description would lose most of them. Part of the answer depends on where you are going. You may need to give some context on the history of the internet. Especially with current college students; they are all digital natives who don't remember a time before browsers and cell phones; so I might start with some basics on the world wide web; and the problem JavaScript and its ilk were meant to solve.

• In the beginning the web was focused solely on structured markup.
• As MOSAIC (the first graphical web based browser built by a team at University of Illinois) transitioned to commercial products, notably Netscape's Navigator browser and Microsoft's Internet Explorer; there was a realization that tags themselves were not enough; and there was competition between commercial players in integrating scripting as part of the web; initially thought of as a way to provide more sophisticated animation as part of the page.
• The language Java was emerging from Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) as a new, type safe and object oriented language derived from the language C's syntax.
• Netscape embraced Java; and began writing much of their software in it.
• JavaScript as a language has very little to do with Java the language other than sharing a name. JavaScript is interpreted, is not type safe--that is it does not enforce checking that integers are integers, strings are strings, etc--and models many of it's best features from functional programming languages like Lisp. Like Java it does use a C like syntax; and while it support objects, they are supported using prototypical--where object definition is implicit--rather than class inheritance as languages like Java and Python do where class definition is separate from object instantiation.

In my class we did a section on early internet evolution that put alot of this in context (one class; where I had guest speakers who worked on building early browsers...I'm a dinosaur too so I know other dinosaurs).

Then the other stuff is good to illustrate the difference. Esp. with node one of the practical things to discuss is since it was an embedded language to start; alot of features people take for granted (say coming from Java) like packages and modules aren't part of the core engine. Those had to be invented so that JavaScript could run in a REPL when node was introduced.

I think this answer is the second derivative.

Maybe it depends on who are you are targeting with the course. If it's someone who is just graduating from using a browser to writing something in the browser, the student will be completely lost. If it's someone who has most of an undergraduate CS education, including a course on compilers, you are fine.

I'm teaching an introductory course on web tech right now at Ashesi University; and while my students have been programming in Python for a while, have taken data structures your description would lose most of them. Part of the answer depends on where you are going. You may need to give some context on the history of the internet. Especially with current college students; they are all digital natives who don't remember a time before browsers and cell phones; so I might start with some basics on the world wide web; and the problem JavaScript and its ilk were meant to solve.

• In the beginning the web was focused solely on structured markup.
• As MOSAIC (the first graphical web based browser built by a team at University of Illinois) transitioned to commercial products, notably Netscape's Navigator browser and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, there was a realization that tags themselves were not enough; and there was competition between commercial players in integrating scripting as part of the web, initially thought of as a way to provide more sophisticated animation as part of the page.
• The language Java was emerging from Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) as a new, type safe and object oriented language derived from the language C's syntax.
• Netscape embraced Java, and began writing much of their software in it.
• JavaScript as a language has very little to do with Java the language other than sharing a name. JavaScript is interpreted, is not type safe--that is, it does not enforce checking that integers are integers, strings are strings, etc--and models many of it's best features from functional programming languages like Lisp. Like Java it does use a C like syntax; and while it support objects, they are supported using prototypical--where object definition is implicit--rather than class inheritance as languages like Java and Python do where class definition is separate from object instantiation.

In my class we did a section on early internet evolution that put a lot of this in context (one class, where I had guest speakers who worked on building early browsers... I'm a dinosaur too so I know other dinosaurs).

Then the other stuff is good to illustrate the difference. Esp. with node one of the practical things to discuss is since it was an embedded language to start; a lot of features people take for granted (say coming from Java) like packages and modules aren't part of the core engine. Those had to be invented so that JavaScript could run in a REPL when Node was introduced.