alt Hacker NewsOr maybe just get comfortable with adding versions and deprecation. eg optparse to argparse (though tbf, I would have just preferred it was optparse2). Or maybe the problem is excessive stability commitments. I think I prefer languages that realize things can improve and are willing to say if you want to run 10 year old code, use a 10 year old compiler/runtime.
I think I prefer languages that realize things can improve and are willing to say if you want to run 10 year old code, use a 10 year old compiler/runtime.
IMHO, the trouble with that stance is that it leaves no path to incrementally update a long-lived system to benefit from any of those improvements.
Suppose we have an application that runs on 2025’s most popular platform and in ten years we’re porting it to whatever new platform is popular in 2035. Personally, I’d like to know that all the business logic and database queries and UI structure and whatever else we wrote that was working before will still be working on the new platform, to whatever extent that makes sense. I’d like to make only some reasonably necessary set of changes for things that are actually different between the two platforms.
If we can’t do that, our only other option is a big rewrite. That is how you get a Python 2 to Python 3 situation. And that, in turn, is how you get a lot of systems stuck on the older version for years, despite all the advantages any later versions might offer.