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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the current focus on "do all the breaking changes we want to do so that we can get to 1.0" naturally leads to a prevalence of breaking changes. So in a strange way, yes, this sort of breaking change is evidence of the language stabilizing.

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I don't think we can really consider it to be "stabilizing" when there are relatively significant and breaking changes like this still going on.

It may be headed in the direction of stability, but that's quite different from stabilizing.

We can consider it to be stabilizing once the language and standard libraries have been frozen, and the only changes happening are very minor ones that are fixing critical bugs.

Until then, it's still in the research and development stage, at best.

I think "heading in the direction of stability" and "stabilizing" are the same thing. But pedantry aside, it does really seem to me that the breaking changes going on now are fundamentally different in character than those that used to happen - they are much less about experimental functionality, and much more about "let's fix as many of our frustrations as possible before we're stuck with them". For instance, the specific change under discussion would (I think) be fairly easy to re-add backwards compatibly, but probably impossible to remove.

But meh, this maybe ours is a (boring) purely definitional disagreement - I think we can consider it stabilized once the language and standard libraries have been frozen and only bug fixes and minor changes are occurring.

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