Hacker News Reader

Clojure has had only a single backward breaking change since its creation in 2008, it took 10 full years before being introduced, and it was a pretty minor one at that.

Java and the JVM themselves value backward compatibility, and I'd say Clojure takes it a notch above that.

View on HN

I guess I have missed that. What was the change?

When they added clojure.spec. It started validating macros at compile time. If you were previously using an illegal syntax, but that somehow didn't cause any issues, those would now throw a compile time error.

Overall it was for the best, since prior to that it was just weird code that had a bit of a undefined behavior since it wasn't using the macro in the proper way. But it still meant we had to go and fix a few of them so they compiled again. Though in the process we realized that we were misusing the macros to begin with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com