[titzer]

> They're just the symptom of the disease that is future shock.

Yes, absolutely, and I hope you mean that in the capital-F "Future Shock", Alvin Toffler sense, because there is a lot he wrote that hasn't even been carried over and digested. Software is an endlessly disorienting sea of change, getting faster and thus worse as time progresses, and it's frankly madness at this point.

It seems absolutely no one is committed to providing a stable platform for any purpose whatsoever. Even Java, where I spent many years being ingrained with the absolute necessity of backwards compatibility with old (perhaps even dumb) classfile versions, has been making breaking changes as part of its ramp up to semi-annual major version releases. Node Long Term Support "typically guarantees that critical bugs will be fixed for a total of 30 months."[1] Pfft. It's a joke. You can't get your damn API design straight by version 12? I'll do my damnedest to avoid you forever, then. It's so unserious and frankly irresponsible to break so much stuff so often.

But change only begets more change. We're all on an endless treadmill, constantly adapting to the change for no reason. And people have to adapt to our changes, and so it goes.

[1] https://nodejs.org/en/about/releases/

[kaba0]

That’s ingenious to write off Java as not backwards compatible. The only change they did was closing the doors to the internals of the JVM because those are implementation-dependent anyway (meaning those programs wouldn’t have worked on anything not OpenJDK) and are likely to change. You can still absolutely run a class file compiled to Java 1.0 on a JDK 16.

[koeng]

How about Golang in this case? AFAIK there haven't been any breaking changes yet.

[titzer]

It is definitely a breath of fresh air in that regard.