This is a huge reason why open source projects are often so much more successful than corporate clones: they actually iterate and innovate, something corporate america has forgotten how to do.
For example, ruby deprecated the `File.exists?`, and changed it to `File.exist?`, because enough people felt that the version with the `s` didn't make sense grammatically (which I disagree with, but that is not germane to my point).
For a long time, you would get warning that `exists?` was deprecated and should be replaced by `exist?`.... but why? Why couldn't they just leave `exists?` as an alias to `exist?`? There was not cost, the functions are literally identical except for one letter. While the change was trivial to fix, it added annoyance for no reason.
Although, luckily for me, with Ruby I can just make exists? an alias myself, but why make me do that?!? What is the point of removing the method that has been there forever just because you think the s is wrong?
You get to use open source projects for free, and a lot of people do ongoing maintenance on them which you benefit from for free. In return, sometimes you are expected to modify your code which depends on those projects because it makes their maintainer's life easier.
Personally, I see that as a very reasonable trade-off.
Of course it's relevant. It's a laughably trivial example compared to the other one in this thread.
I also have to hope all the dependencies I use did that, too.
But my real question is why? Why make me do it at all?
You were free to show up and argue against it, as was anyone else. Did you?
I am not arguing that they don’t have the RIGHT to make the change, or that they owe me personally anything. I am not even THAT mad. I still love Ruby the most of any language, and generally think they make the right decisions.
I am simply annoyed by this decision.
And yes, I argued against this change when it was first proposed (as did many others). They obviously were not convinced.
Again, I am not arguing that they should be FORCED to do what I want, or that they did something shady or nefarious by making this change. I am not asking for any remedy.
I am simply saying I disagree with this type of change (changing a method name because some people feel the new name makes more grammatical sense, but not changing the method itself at all). The reason I commented was because this is not a “we have to deprecate things for progress” situation. They aren’t limited in any way by the current method, the syntax isn’t cumbersome (and isn’t changing), there is no other capability that is held back by having to maintain this method. It is literally just “I read it as asking ‘Does this file exist?’ rather than asking ‘This file exists?’”
Again, they are obviously free to disagree with me, which they do. I am simply arguing that we shouldn’t break syntax just because you like the way it reads better without an s. And I am asking for someone who disagrees with me (you) to explain why it is worth making this type of change.
Are there changes I disagree with? Of course. But I'd rather live in a world that moves forward and occasionally breaks me, than one where I have perfect compatibility but am stuck on code lacking the new innovations my competitors benefit from.
The whole idea behind deprecating things is to give people time to make the changes before they become breaking.
I went and looked: exists? was marked as deprecated in 2013 and removed in 2022. That's enormously generous, my previous comparison with the disttools debacle in python was inaccurate. You had a decade!
10 years is not an especially long time period for a software project to be maintained. There's a reason the Linux project is so emphatic that it never breaks user space.
Now multiply that by.... every past history of every API and it makes adopting something really difficult as a newcomer.
aka Common Lisp.
But it wasn't up to me. It's not my project. I'm using somebody else's project, and at the end of the day it's their decision, because they own it. Unless it's impossible to work around, I feel like I have to either respect that, or switch to an alternative.
You're free to maintain a patch on top of Ruby to add the alias and run that on your machines, btw. It would probably be very simple, although certainly not as simple as aforementioned sed command...
But this is a discussion forum, and I am asking for people who agree with the decision to explain why they agree. Again, they don’t have to answer me if they don’t want to. I am just saying, “if anyone knows an argument for this type of change, I would love to hear it”
Saying they don’t have to explain their reasoning is true but not really relevant to our conversation. I am not asking THEM, I am asking HN readers.
Comments like this are honestly just asshole-ish.
It’s wrong to shut down discussion like this with comments like “it’s their code”, “make your own fork”, etc. because Ruby is supposed to be part of the open source community, which implies collaboration, give and take, discussion of pros and cons, etc.
What you are doing is ignoring this major aspect of a programming language and taking this weird anti social stance on it.
I didn't say to fork it. Do you really not appreciate the difference between rebasing a trivial patch forever, and maintaining a wholesale fork forever?
Fork, patch, maintaining your private whatever, that’s not the point, and is a digression.
This sort of choice is very common in Ruby, you can have different style choices for the same functionality. You can have blocks made with {} or do and end. You can do conditionals in the form of “a if b” or “if b then a”. You can call methods with or without parentheses.
These are all Ruby style choices, and we already have a way to enforce a particular style for a particular project with formatters like rubocop.
That's an incredibly ignorant claim. Just run "git log" in glibc, it won't take you very long to prove yourself wrong.
See you think it's Progress, but it's actually Regress. It's not a moving forward, but backward.
Do not break contract. Do not break API. Do not break muscle memory. Everytime you do, kittens die horribly. Just Say No!