[robinsonb5]

Well yeah, 1000 years is obvious hyperbole. But I've been annoyed and frustrated enough by churn over the last two and a half decades that I always ask myself "will this still work in 5 years?" when considering new software - and especially its build process.

It's alarming how often the answer isn't a confident "yes".

[chikere232]

That's fair. Too many languages and frameworks are all too happy to break things for pointless cleanups or renames.

Python for example makes breaking changes in minor releases and seems to think it's fine, even though it's especially bad for a language where you might only find that out runtime

[sgarland]

Python doesn’t follow SemVer. It’s more like “3.{major}.{patch}.” Also, they have deprecation warnings for many, many releases before finally killing something off.

[chikere232]

yeah, it follows their documentation, it's just a bad idea.

A lot of the things they break are pretty minor cleanups and it seems they could easily not have broken things. Many other languages, even compiled languages where the explosions happen at compilation, are much more careful about these things. For a dynamic language like python it's an especially bad idea.