As always the key is getting the information to the right people at the right time, and making it more difficult to make the wrong choices then the right choices.
> At the end of the day, everyone needs to get work done, and if they see a code-path already being used from 10 places in the code-base despite these soft warnings–it doesn’t seem crazy to introduce another.
Even the best person with the best intentions will take a short cut under some circumstances, meaning to fix it later then getting distracted before that happens.
That’s not always the case.
When Flash dies Jan 12, 2021, you’ll see what I mean.
There’s been so much misinformation about it, but there’s an OS datetime check in the Flash viewer code, browsers will disable the plugin even for some older versions not just new releases and have or will remove PPAPI and NPAPI support, and Windows already has an optional update to kill Flash support that will be part of regular updates in Summer 2021.
Even with three years of warning, it’s not ok.
It’s an extreme case of deprecation, being attempted by the best in the business, but it is inherently bad, and there’s hardly a good way of doing it.
My point is that deprecation is by its very nature going to hurt something that isn’t prepared for its demise.
There is no good way to do it. There are only less bad ways to do it.
They don’t care if you sympathize. The business or institution decides how it wants to prioritize replacement, and some projects miss deadlines.
If you think that every application running in an enterprise has stopped using Flash, you’re sorely mistaken.
> My point is that deprecation is by its very nature going
> to hurt something that isn’t prepared for its demise.
You're describing the end of Life of Adobe Flash that hits at the end of 2020.
Deprecation is different from EOL (Flash has been deprecated for some time now), and deprecating/EOLing a creation tool/product line has little similarity with tooling to deprecate internal APIs gracefully.
Although I do think that you and TFA agree on how difficult it is to deprecate functionality that folks rely on, it seems like you're talking about two wildly different facets of that statement.