alt Hacker NewsThis whole discussion reminds me of the beautiful design of UTF-8. They used the lower bits to be ASCII which made backwards compatibility so much easier. It also reminds me of the failure of Intels Itanium and the success of AMD x64. Engineers often want to abandon backwards compatibility to make a new "beautiful" design, but it's the design that has full backwards compatibility that's actual impressive.
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krupan • last Saturday at 6:39 AM
So well said! Those are great comparisons.
liquidpele • last Saturday at 3:09 PM
It would maybe be okay at the router to break some things, but ffs even in software I have to choose? Why do I need both ping and ping6 this is stupid!! They really screwed up by making it a breaking change to the OS and not just internet routing.
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It reminds me of python 3. Basically, a huge chunk of people (in my case, scientific programming) get an enormous mess and nothing at all of value until... 3.6 maybe (the infix matrix mult operator). Stunningly, people weren't enthused about this deal.