[kbenson]

> It's not exactly clear how can Perl programs or shell scripts or Makefiles from 20 years ago play perfectly fine unchanged, but the syntax of a manifest or playbook that does a couple of simple operations cannot remain stable.

It's clear when you deal with both types of systems. Perl optimized for stability and backwards compatibility at the cost of new features and new language conveniences. This is great and a strength when all your competitors are playing catch-up or don't have enough market share to make an impact, but once that's not the case, anything new they bring to the table is a point in their favor, and you get what we have now, the long slow death of Perl.

Backwards compatibility is wonderful until there's a really useful feature that it prevents, then all of a sudden it's a more complex story because it's not just preventing busywork, it's preventing progress.

[taneq]

There seems to have been a strong swing in the past decade or so towards busywork being not just acceptable but in some way laudable. "Doing the work" to keep your product using all latest versions is noble, whether or not you actually gain anything by upgrading. I can't shake the feeling that it all ties in to the industry wide push for SaaS and subscription models and evergreen software, all of which share an underlying motivation of everlasting job security for software companies and the people who work for them.

It's a similar attitude to the parts of the OSS community who feel that anyone complaining about poor documentation or usability just "doesn't want to do the work" to understand the system.

[bredren]

This is happening in Django land right now.