Darren New wrote:
Given that MS is, to a large extent, working to maintain backward
compatibility in many things,
.Net and the CLR kinda broke the *entire freakin' Windows API*. Visual
Basic .Net didn't even maintain compatibility with Visual Basic let
alone the API. OpenOffice is better at reading old Word documents than
new versions of Word.
Microsoft is a *lousy* example of backward compatibility on almost every
front.
and given that open source projects like
Ruby nevertheless needlessly break backward compatibility with every
minor release, I don't see where having it "open" is that big a win.
And other projects like Apache, Python and Tcl *don't* don't break
backward compatibility on every minor release. In addition, they also
declare certain "business versions" that are then supported for much
longer than the intermediate ones.
Finally, being "open" means that I can choose a specific version of,
say, Ruby, an *not get forced to upgrade* because I can backport changes
that I need. It's not easy, but RedHat has certainly demonstrated that
backporting can be made to work.
How many Java AWT-based applets still run?
Ummmm, almost all of them.
Computational Geometry Applet from 1998:
http://maven.smith.edu/~orourke/books/CompGeom/CompGeom.html
This has been my actual experience with Java. An abandoned Java project
is *far* easier to resurrect that an abandoned C/C++ project. Not only
will the Java project still compile with the correct flags, the actual
bytecode and application probably still runs *without* recompiling. In
addition, any library dependencies probably exist as JAR's and even
*they* still work.
Just try to find a 1998 C/C++ program that runs without recompiling on a
2007 OS. Games are your best shot, and even most of them don't.
-a
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