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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

i like fast movement, i like communities that dare to break things every now and then (see semver.org for the widely accepted versioning rules and should be honoured).

much do i prefer an increasingly better solution to a stable one. i'm not agueing "perfect" over "good enough"; i'm argueing "awesome" over "good enough" :)

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You might be a great Microsoft developer.

Use this API, no this one, nope now this one, you almost caught up, so we released a newer, more better one! Please buy Awesome Studio and RDMS 2015 or you are a loser. Here's a free version that can't do shit, the Pro version is only $2000, plus lots of your time adjusting to a newer mono/flat chrome development environment. Hot keys only for touch screen users!

I can give such examples for any commercial vendor and in terms of breaking compatibility, there are a few examples in FOSS land as well.

> I can give such examples for any commercial vendor and in terms of breaking compatibility, there are a few examples in FOSS land as well

But that wouldn't have the same emotional appeal as MS ;)

Microsoft are a massive tech company though.

Correct me if my history is a little fuzzy, but isn't it Apple that plays the part of "move fast, worry later" so well? After all, Apple has been the front-runner when it comes to things like, "f--k your floppy/CD drive/FireWire/display-adapter, we're moving on", and that's just in hardware.

Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job maintaining backwards compatibility, considering the size of their user base and variety of software to accommodate. Though perhaps that makes it a better metaphor for PHP development than Python.

It's not like you still couldn't plug in an old CD drive into your Mac. It will still work just fine. You can't plug in an old Python 2.x plugin into Python 3.x.

Why not. Are you familiar with SciPy's `weave` module? It's basically a plugin for plugging C++ code into your Python. In a variety of extremely cool compile-on-the-fly ways. It's really quite sweet :)

No reason you can't do that with Python 2.7. Should be easier in fact because the interface will be much thinner.

I am NOT saying this is a good idea however! Haha

That's interesting. I'll look it up.

Microsoft maintains good backward compatibility, but has a habit of releasing a new way of doing things every five minutes.

Particularly look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810810.aspx#bkmk_D... and windows current / deprecated/obsoleted ones.

Just to connect your Windows program to a Microsoft database.

To be fair, most of those deprecated technologies are 10 to 20 years old and use paradigms that wouldn't cut it with how we build software today.

Apple wants users to buy new hardware and I guess they figure it's not a big deal because you can buy adapters and/or hardware is usually bought together in generations. Their software APIs have remained quite stable; certainly no Silverlight-esque shenanigans from them.

Good point. Apple might frequently break compatibility even at hardware level but they do provide adapters if you really need it, making transitioning a no-brainer. The problem with python is that there are no such adapters at all.

I find this hardware compatibility thing a bit of a non issue. I have a usb dvd drive and floppy drive for that matter. Don't use em much to be honest. Will be using the dvd a lot in a bit while I migrate my dvd collection entirely to my nas box. (aka dd if=/dev/whatever of=/some/file) but thats mostly an exception and desire to get rid of stupid physical stuff.

As for Apple not being backward compatible, going to have to disagree a bit. Rosetta for example kept ppc code running on intel for a long time (10.6). Apple generally will give you a couple OS release notice that xyz is on its way out, start fixing it now or planning your path. To be honest I prefer that approach. Its measured, but still decent enough to handle moving on. Now with being able to run OSX in vmware fusion i'm pretty much of the opinion the backward compatibility canard in general is kinda a non issue overall. But just my opinion really.

I will say compared to things like systemd/ubuntu I've had a lot less breaking annoyances on OSX than any other unix/os including windows. By and large it works fine. Now mind you all I do is run chrome/firefox/safari/emacs/vmware on osx mostly so not like my needs are complex. But I guess all the rapid change in apple land really kinda goes by me using it. All I do is wait for vmware to work on the new os and then its game on.

I'm rambling but basically I think there is room for both types of iteration, or even a combination.

Thanks for the advice; only 2000 for "pro"? Wow! Where can I pay?

No, Microsoft never breaks anything. They deprecate relentlessly and push out new libs to replace old ones, but they never have the balls to actually fix anything. It's immensely frustrating that no lib ever reaches better than 80% good. It goes "1.0broken -> 1.1usable -> 2.0baroque -> 2.1deprecated -> Replacement lib 1.0broken".

>"Here's a free version that can't do shit"

Depends what you are doing. I worked in a multinational mobile game studio and developers were using Visual C++ express, which was actually pretty capable for what we were doing.

You clearly aren't running extensive production systems with little administrative resources. Code is written 15 years ago, and it's still running. Any changes that break something are major headache, usually leading rolling things back to working version. Nobody knows or cares to fix those things to achieve compatibility with new version. This leads to situation where nothing at all is ever updated. And even known bugs and exploits aren't getting fixed. Oh well, that's business as usual.

But when I'm writing new code, I'm of course using Python 3.

> But when I'm writing new code, I'm of course using Python 3.

There's no "of course" about it, which is the point of the article. It is interesting that you're using Python3. It means that you're not blocked by library availability (public or company-internal). It means that you are permitted by management to use it. It probably means that you prefer it.

My situation is different on the last two points, but I am also not blocked by library availability.

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