[edibleEnergy]

What this article arrives at is basically the perl/CPAN model. Don’t break backwards compatibility unless you absolutely have to; as in cases of security or when the original functionality never worked in the first place.

[akkartik]

That's interesting. Could you point me at a good link for learning more? I spent a little time with CPAN back in 2001/2002 and ran screaming. Perhaps it's gotten better since.

[edibleEnergy]

Sure, https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpolicy.html#BACKWARD-COMPATIBIL... that’s the policy for the language itself, but as it mentions there it’s considered generally a “community” virtue. I wasn’t programming back in 02 so I’m sure it was extremely different (and the source I’ve read from modules from that era is pretty frightening. Any major framework or generally used module will try to maintain backwards compatibility at least as far as documented behavior. I’ve never come across the kind of stuff I see all the time with node and go and python; package maintainers changing parameters and such because they weren’t happy with the original API.