I have to say I am on of those people who love backward compatibility. I actually come from a programming language that did exactly what the quote says. It was not a fun experience. Python 3 broke compatibility with python 2. Most of the libraries did ignore python 3 for quite some time and some still do. Actually if you google for "python 3" the second search result of it is the "python wall of shame" where you will find many of python libraries still stuck to python 2. The reason is that is a lot of work to rewrite parts of library to make it compatible with python 3. And note that python 3 has been around for 5 years. And is most likely it will be another 5 till most major python libraries are finally ported to python 3.
http://python3wos.appspot.com/ Usually when I see "tragic fate" , "dead" , "declined" etc mentioned in the same sentence with a programming language I am certain that it will mention some "big flaw" of the language and I am going to facepalm myself. In 99% of all case of "dead" languages it has nothing to do with the language itself and has everything to do with hype and lack of good marketing. I can tell you one thing, AFAIK the decision to brake compatibility with python is still a big reason why one should not use python and is considered one of the big flaw of python. I know that some people are in denial, and I agree that python has been improved but not without paying a big price as the "wall of shame" clearly shows. I can bring you another example, blenderpython, its the well known Blender python api of the well known open source 3d app. Well if you take a look at it you will find two things. a) blender 2.5 has been a rewrite which is a very good thing but that ment sacrificing many useful addons because not only the library changed but also they moved from python 2 to 3 and b) API keeps braking compatibility in almost every single version. The result is an army of addons that are left unmaintained because the author makes something but he is not able to maintain every second month because the developer decided to brake compatibility. Users ask for updates to the addons and usually developers search for another developer to maintain but most of those addons are left for dead. And that is thousands of lines of code gone to waste. Actually very few developers stick to blenderpython for this very reason. So no I have to disagree there, between choosing a better language or a useful library and code that works in long term, I choose the second. I am full on progress but I do find braking compatibility is just the easy , convinient solution that does not quite work well in practice . ________________________________ From: Fernando Olivero <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, 11 December 2012, 10:36 Subject: [Pharo-project] About (backwards) Compatibility Hi, i wanted to share an "old" quote which i find relevant to our community. Just replace FORTRAN's with loads of stuff we had in the bloated images in the past, most of them useful to get were we are right now. "FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes. I pray daily that more of my fellow-programmers may find the means of freeing themselves from the curse of compatibility." Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972
