And here I was hoping for some kind of thesis on the woeful state of affairs surrounding the fact they've had 2 major versions competing for developers attention, the with "older" fork being the more the widely supported one.
Looking now, "Appendix A of the Fortran 77 standard lists 24 things that are not backward compatible in moving from f66 and f77."
Please tell me how the chasm between Python 2.7 and Python 3.3 is significantly broader than the chasm between the aforementioned languages.
VB.NET is effectively a different language entirely. It's programming .NET with VB-like syntax, not the VB language running on .NET (in my mind, anyways)
What about Old S v.s New S? S v.s S4? S vs. R?
What about D1 and D2 of the D programming language?
Classic awk vs. nawk?
Honestly, I could go on. I think the person I'm responding to really doesn't know much about programming language histories.
There is a difference between a language rewrite and changing just enough of a language that it might have well been a rewrite.