wrote in message news:56df3dfb.10...@fleshgrinder.com...
@Tony Marston: I feel directly attacked and offended and others have the
feeling too, that is the definition of an insult. That being said, I am
staying constructive the whole time and do not avoid communication with
you or anyone else because I think we are discussing an important topic.
BUT! As Rowan Collins said, keep your emotions aside.
The fact that one person sees that as a personal insult while millions of
others do not just points to the low threshold of that individual. If I were
to write "you are a f*cking idiot" then that WOULD be a personal insult in
everybody's eyes, but what I wrote was nowhere near being that personal or
that insulting.
The fact that that you take offence at my opinion is balanced by the fact
that I take offence whenever someone suggests breaking my favourite language
FOR NO GOOD REASON other than a personal preference.
On 3/8/2016 10:47 AM, Tony Marston wrote:
"Rowan Collins" wrote in message news:56dd68c0.1090...@gmail.com...
Out of curiosity, which languages are you referring to? It would be
interesting to see if there are specific lessons we can learn from
their development and compatibility processes, even if the ecosystem
they exist in is very different to ours.
COBOL and UNIFACE.
The history of COBOL shows that it was completely overhauled very often
and major changed and breaks had to be made in order to rescue the
language from being a mess.
As a developer who went through several COBOL upgrades I can attest to the
fact that BC breaks were extremely rare and only for a good reason. My code
was never affected simply because I never used any of the dodgy features
(such as ALTER ... GO TO ...) which were removed. My company, which was
using a framework which I had designed and wriiten, upgraded from COBOL-74
to COBOL-85 without *ANY* issues whatsoever.
Later the designers of COBOL faced the same
problems as we face them here right now, people complained about
changes. In the 1990s the language started declining in popularity and
was replaced by others.
You are missing the fact that there are still billions of lines of working
COBOL code out there simply because it would be too expensive to rewrite all
that code in a different language.
Pay special attention to the fact that over 300 dialects of COBOL exist
and that compatibility issues was one of its major criticized points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Compatibility_issues
Uniface is not a programming language like PHP but they also had
multiple breaking changes between releases. All documented publicly and
easy to find, e.g.:
Irrelevant. I personally started with UNIFACE v5 and move through v6 and v7
without any BC breaks. How was this possible? Because I never used those
features which caused problems and were later removed.
http://unifaceinfo.com/docs/0905/Uniface_Library_HTML/ulibrary/Migration_5C39D681F0922AFC1A7859CF394AC2F7.html
I am actually not trying to deface Tony Marston here, I am just saying
that it is unavoidable to deprecate and delete features at some point in
order to keep a language tidy and comprehensible while still offering
people and easy way to upgrade.
Imposing your personal ideas of "tidy" and "comprehensible" on the entire
PHP userland community is not something that pleases that community.
The easiest way to upgrade does not involve having to change working code
FOR NO GOOD REASON.
--
Tony Marston
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