On 09/05/2013 05:01 AM, David T. Lewis wrote:
On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 08:38:04AM +0200, Marcus Denker wrote:
Why do you need to support Squeak 3.8? This is how many years old?
I really do not understand this idea to be compatible to all old versions ever.
I do not think that there is any right or wrong answer to this, it is
perhaps a matter of personal perspective. For me, much of my professional
experience is related to supporting manufacturing operations for a large
commercial company. In this environment, the ability to engineer solutions
to new problems without disrupting existing operations is critical. To
me, a failure related to software changes is not just a red mark on a
unit test, it is a significant emotional event if I cause a manufacturing
plant to stop production (thankfully this has rarely happened in my career
so far, knock wood).
So maybe this makes me "conservative", but from my point of view the ability
to deliver future versions of software that work without breaking older
versions is a matter of good engineering discipline, and I stand by that
as a matter of principle.
This is a very good principle :). As an example, at 3DICC we are
currently on Squeak4.1, but I think it wasn't that long ago that it was
3.8 based.
Of course, all things come to an end. But with larger systems the life
cycles are often unbelievably long.
regards, Göran
