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by sporkland 568 days ago
Reminds me of the Rich Hickey talk Speculation[1]. There is a special place in hell reserved for programmers that break back compat (for non-security impacting reasons) with widely used libraries, including google's guava developers. Linus Torvalds seems to be the only engineer with his head on straight on this topic and he has to constantly dive in and berate people that are trying to violate it in his project.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk
2 comments
int_19h 567 days ago
The culture around JS seems to believe that, between semver and package version pinning, there's some kind of mandate to do things like massive incompatible API refactoring, so long as you update the major version number.

The result is what TFA describes.

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throwaway2037 567 days ago
Can you provide an example where Google Guava broken backwards compatibility? I have used it for more than 10 years without any issues during upgrades. To be fair, it is a huge library, and I have probably barely used 20%.
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Freak_NL 567 days ago
Oh, this is common. Fun when you have two different dependencies which both use Guava, but different versions, and you can't upgrade them to a common shared one. The solution there usually means having to shade Guava for one of them, which sucks, but it at least gets things working.

It's not much of a problem when you use it yourself, but it is when your dependencies do.

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