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Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

Surely you can keep it backwards compatible AND give people access to the new good stuff?

> Surely you can keep it backwards compatible AND give people access to the new good stuff?

New API versions are not rolled out lightly. You roll them out only when you cannot give access to the new stuff while preserving compatibility.

Otherwise you'd just update/extend the old version.

Not if the API reflects a fundamental change in flows. E.g. not fun to proxy a sync API into the new async one which splits a single operation into three.

That's a reason not to make fundamental changes to your flows, but the example given isn't that difficult. It's probably how the developer on the customer's side is going to deal with the issue, so you may as well do it for them. Trying to convince any meaningful percentage of customers to rewrite fundamental aspects of their existing integration to support your product roadmap isn't going to happen, so don't expect it.

> That's a reason not to make fundamental changes to your flows (...)

You're somehow assuming the engineering teams involved in making these decisions don't think through these issues and just jumpstart changes to critical parts of their business without any thought or consideration.

In the meantime, engineers need to work in the real world, with real world requirements and constraints. Often enough, these include introduce breaking changes, such as changes to workflows.

It is entirely unhelpful to lay grand claims based on your ability to wish whole problems away. Don't like catching a flu? Well, that's a reason to not get sick. Insightful.

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