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Comment by treehau5 | Hacker News Reader

My comment to you two is -- why not both?

Stability, sanity, all that is amazing, and a must have.

But also bug-fixes, security improvements, and performance improvements are wonderful too, which tends to come with using up-to-date dependencies.

The problem with the latter, as you mentioned, is when it introduces breaking API changes and is wholly not backwards compatible. This is not a "kids playing with toys wanting to experiment problem" this is a bad software problem, which is why I like Go, and why I liked Java when I was doing it full time. If the language you use has backwards compatibility as a first-class citizen, most likely the package authors will act that way too, and then the maintainers, and eventually the developers. Limit your software choices to those who care about not breaking everyone's shit every 2 weeks. Heck even when I write my own API's now that I know only my company is going to use internally I am thinking about this.

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Backwards compatibility is seriously under appreciated. When I tell developers to ensure that their changes are backwards compatible, they tend to look at me like I'm green.

I do not understand the disconnect that developers have with understanding all of the benefits that it brings. Yes, you have some extra code in your code base so it's less clean. You also have a stable environment as a result. The first affects only your personal preference. The latter affects all of your developers and users.

Unless you have a situation where it's impossible to maintain, not insisting on it is pure self interest.

I do not understand the disconnect that developers have with understanding all of the benefits that it brings.

Because they've never worked on an old codebase, because front-end technologies change so often and everything just gets re-written anyway. It's a waste of time worrying about this when the code won't make it to is first birthday.

If you were speaking to seasoned C and DB developers about stability in the tools and the platform, you'd be preaching to the choir.

This gets to the complaint that so much of the open source ecosystem gets to version 0.8.6 (whether it's named that or not) and then completely rewritten "this time the right way". That's not actually a good thing.

As jwz put it,

> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

> Yes, you have some extra code in your code base so it's less clean. You also have a stable environment as a result. The first affects only your personal preference. The latter affects all of your developers and users.

Backward compatibility has real costs. You cannot restructure your code base as easy, you cannot deprecate bad ideas, cannot extend it as easy more and so on and so on. Sure, it also has real benefits (as you've stated), but missing the disadvantages while only highlighting the advantages is not a useful approaching, it only shows "your personal preference".

No, the former results in a bloated code base full of old legacy crap that no one understands and is afraid to touch because it might break. You have to insert weird workarounds because that bug is now a feature to some idiot and you provide backwards compatibility so it lives forever now.

Has software quality increased now that everyone is refactoring and rewriting everything for every release?

I don't think so.

Its just plain arrogance to believe your are a better developer than the guy who came before. Having some fear of breaking the code base is healthy, the same way that having a little fear that the chainsaw is going to cut off your leg makes you safer.

I like your answer. It's civilized, balanced, and I agree with every word of it :-)

I'll add as an anecdote that I do follow your practices (limiting dependencies). It works wonderfully on Debian stable (most of the software there is now >2 years old, the next version has just been soft frozen). I have the occasional package pulled from testing: I recently toyed with Perl6. And currently I use a newer version of python3-sphinx for a nicer doc syntax but I could do without. It causes no headaches at all.

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