The inventor of Ruby on Rails gave a talk about this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOFTop3AMZ8
On Dec 11, 2012, at 11:02 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <[email protected]> wrote:
> yeah, but that's a direct path to stagnation, and that's what happened with
> fortran, java and all the languages that have put backward compatibility as
> top priority.
> in other side, .net is not backward compatible and it has success anyway so,
> is not so clear for me.
>
> I still prefer to drop backward compatibility time to time to drop a full
> language each 10 years :)
>
> Esteban
>
> On Dec 11, 2012, at 10:23 AM, dimitris chloupis <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
