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by georgemcbay 5174 days ago
I'm actually quite fond of the way Microsoft historically bent over backwards for backward compatibility, but OTOH Facebook is also very successful and has a very successful ecosystem of third-party users of their APIs. Facebook is like the anti-Microsoft in that they randomly change and break their APIs at such an alarming rate that you have to wonder if they are intentionally fucking with you if you code against their APIs.

Obviously the needs for a web API and the needs for an API with a specific binary ABI on a local OS are quite different but I think for either environment, most API developers can comfortably fit somewhere between those two extremes where they don't continue to support inherently unsupported API usage, but they don't break something randomly every week.
2 comments
grogs 5174 days ago
Facebook making breaking changes does piss people off. It's interesting that it doesn't kill the apps. I can't remember any single change Facebook have made - possibly just because tere's so many - but I do remember when twitter made everyone switch to OAuth. People complained about that kill date.
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planckscnst 5174 days ago
I think developers tend to love backward-compatability while users hate it.

As a developer, it means we don't have to keep digging out the old projects and porting them to the new API.

As a user, it means we are left with systems that have many years of cruft and with features being held back from systems because they couldn't make it backward-compatabile.

I think most users are willing to pay any higher price that will result from developers being required to work harder to port their software.

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barrkel 5174 days ago
Users love it when their software still works even after they've upgraded another bit of the overall system.
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anonymoushn 5174 days ago
As a developer, I would rather have my code break than continue to use a terrible API.
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dvhh 5174 days ago
How about fixing your application, because your terrible API were deprecated, for an application that is quite old, bit still in support ? (and of course for free, because client don't expect to pay for a compatibility fix).
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