I wish developers of JavaScript frameworks had this level of commitment to stability.
I wish the Python core developers had even the level of commitment to stability that developers of JavaScript frameworks do. Instead they intentionally break API compatibility every single release, I suppose because they assume that only worthless ideas are ever expressed in the form of Python programs.
But then, I normally try to stay on the leading edge. I think it’s more difficult if you leave it 2+ years between updates and ignore deprecation warnings. But with a year between minor releases, that leaves almost a two year window for moving off deprecated things.
I think that’s reasonable. I don’t experience the pain you describe, and I don’t get the impression that the Python project treats Python programs as “worthless”. The people working on Python are Python users too, why would they make their own lives difficult?
Nobody has to worry about ignoring deprecation warnings in libcurl, or for that matter in C, in English, in Unicode, or in linear algebra. There's no point at which your linear algebra theorems stop working because the AMS has deprecated some postulates. Euclid's theorems still work just as well today as they did 2000 years ago. Better, in fact, because we now know of new things they apply to that Euclid couldn't have imagined. You can still read Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or even Cicero without having to "maintain" them first, though admittedly you have to be careful about interpreting them with the right version of language.
That's what it means for intellectual work to have lasting value: each generation can build on the work of previous generations rather than having to redo it.
Last night I watched a Primitive Technology video in which he explains why he wants to roof his new construction with fired clay tiles rather than palm-leaf thatch: in the rainy season, the leaves rot, and then the rain destroys his walls, so the construction only lasts a couple of years without maintenance.
Today I opened up a program I had written in Python not 2000 years ago, not 200 years ago, not even 20 years ago, but only 11 years ago, and not touched since then. I had to fix a bunch of errors the Python maintainers intentionally introduced into my program in the 2-to-3 transition. Moreover, the "fixed" version is less correct than the version I used 11 years ago, because previously it correctly handled filename command-line arguments even if they weren't UTF-8. Now it won't, and there's evidently no way to fix it.
I wish I had written it in Golang or JS. Although it wasn't the case when I started writing Python last millennium, a Python program today is a palm-leaf-thatched rainforest mud hut—intentionally so. Instead, like Euclid, I want to build my programs of something more lasting than mere masonry.
I'm not claiming that you should do the same thing. A palm-leaf-thatched roof is easier to build and useful for many purposes. But it is no substitute for something more lasting.
Today's Python is fine for keeping a service running as long as you have a staff of Python programmers. As a medium of expression of ideas, however, it's like writing in the sand at low tide.
If you're a Mathematician in the nineteenth century (for example Peano) you know what a set is in some sense, and if pressed you'll admit that you don't really have a formal way to explain your intuition. Nevertheless you feel content to write about sets as if they're formally defined, even for the infinite sets.
Turns out you've been relying on an unstated Assumption, the Axiom of Choice. When Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel write down axioms for a coherent set theory they discover that oops, the system works fine either way with this regard to this Axiom, and many years later it was proved to be entirely independent, and yet mathematicians had been gaily assuming it's true, without saying so.
So in a sense Peano and say Turing are working with different, slightly incompatible versions of Mathematics. Euclidean geometry works fine... but today you'll be told that our universe's geometry isn't actually Euclidean, so, if something big enough just doesn't work that's to be expected, Euclid's model is neat but it's not actually a scale model of our universe, our universe is much stranger.
Isn't fixing this the whole point of Python's "surrogateescape" handling? Certainly, if I put the filename straight from sys.argv into open(), Python will pass it through just fine:
$ printf 'Hello, world!' > $'\xFF.txt'
$ python3 -c 'import sys; print(open(sys.argv[1]).read())' $'\xFF.txt'
Hello, world!
But other than that botched transition, Python is very stable. My Python photo downloader from 2004 did not need any changes throughout python 2 lifetime and still works today (using 2.7 interpreter). The oldest python3 script I've found is from 2019, and it still works just fine without any changes.
Most notably is PEP 594 (“Removing dead batteries from the standard library”), which removed 19 obsolete modules. However they were deprecated in Python 3.11 (2022) and removed in Python 3.13 (2024).
So everybody has had two years to update their obsolete code if they want to immediately use new versions of the Python interpreter, and if that isn’t long enough, Python 3.12 is officially supported until 2028. So if you use a module like sunau, which handles an audio format used by SPARC and NeXT workstations in the 80s, then you have six years to figure out what WAVs or MP3s are.
I mean, that last part really unravels your point. Linguistic meanings definitely drift significantly over time in ways that are vitally important, and there are no deprecation warnings about them.
Take the second amendment to the USA constitution, for example. It seems very obviously scoped to “well-regulated militias”, but there are no end to the number of gun ownership proponents who will insist that this isn’t what was meant when it was written, and that the commas don’t introduce a dependent clause like they do today.
Take the Ten Commandments in the Bible. It seems very obvious that they prohibit killing people, but there are no end to the number of death penalty proponents who are Christian who will insist that what it really prohibits is murder, of which state killings are out of scope, and that “thou shalt not kill” isn’t really what was meant when it was written.
These are very clearly meaningful semantic changes. Compatibility was definitely broken.
If “you have to be careful about interpreting them with the right version of the language”, then how is that any different to saying “well just use the right version of the Python interpreter”?
> Today I opened up a program I had written in Python not 2000 years ago, not 200 years ago, not even 20 years ago, but only 11 years ago, and not touched since then. I had to fix a bunch of errors the Python maintainers intentionally introduced into my program in the 2-to-3 transition.
In your own words: You have to be careful about interpreting it with the right version of the language. Just use a Python 2 interpreter if that is your attitude.
I don’t believe software is something that you can write once and assume it will work in perpetuity with zero maintenance. Go doesn’t work that way, JavaScript doesn’t work that way, and Curl – the subject of this article – doesn’t work that way. They might’ve released v7.16.0 eighteen years ago, but they still needed to release new versions over and over and over again since then.
There is no software in the world that does not require maintenance – even TeX received an update a few years ago. Wanting to avoid maintenance altogether is not achievable, and in fact is harmful. This is like sysadmins who are proud of long uptimes. It just proves they haven’t installed any security patches. Regularly maintaining software is a requirement for it to be healthy. Write-once-maintain-never is unhealthy and should not be a goal.