Hacker News Reader

That seems far worse than just deleting the function IMO. The dev teams that most need to refactor are the ones least likely to notice perf slipping.

View on HN

In this scenario I would argue that deleting a function abruptly without verifying impacts is significantly worse than gradually adding a delay. Usually when function deprecations occur impacted dev teams are notified on a shared distro of what's coming in future releases. Library maintainers at large companies typically don't have the bandwidth to investigate each project that uses their library to determine if deleting a function would detrimentally impact a production environment. What a deletion does do is block the downstream dev team in this hypothetical from deploying to prod as they investigate why their builds are suddenly failing (or crashing in prod!) and refactor an alternative solution. Do you really want to work in an environment where other devs feel empowered to break your builds and sprints ad hoc?

I assume they are welcome to use the old version, and this comes after an ignored deprecation warning. If not, then this deletion should come after a forced migration by whatever library team enforces a one version rule.

That broken build won't be pushed to production and affect users, but invisibly slowing down a production service and hoping someone notices via monitoring will probably pass tests, build fine and be pushed to production where it will affect end users. I absolutely want to work in an environment where the build fails rather than people play childish tricks to punish my users because I used a deprecated function, and hope I notice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com