[mamcx]

I can relate, because I have so much things in years that broke left and right, but at the same time (except if you are talking about pre/alphas) I think is unhealthy to be vary of breaking changes.

A language, in special, should be able to do it. Extreme compatibility is the way to make the mistake that is C.

A breaking change that fix something is a investing that extend infinity to the feature.

Fear to do it, like in C, is how you accumulate errors, mistakes, millions of dollars wasted, because is also compound debt.

P.D: I think langs should be fast to break pre 1.0, and maybe have room to do it each 5/7 years. Despite the debacle of Python (that is in fact more reflective of python than of breaking), there should be possible to make a relatively painless sunsetting with good caring

[flohofwoe]

The problem I have with python2 vs python3 wasn't breaking backward compatibility, but that their "solution" for UNICODE strings is such a weird mess (treating string- and byte-streams as something completely separate instead of treating strings as UTF-8 encoded views on byte streams) The only string encoding that matters today is UTF-8, all others are relics from the early 90s and the sooner we get rid of those the better - e.g. Python caused a whole lot of pain for a solution that would have been useful 30 years ago, but not today.

[kbolino]

There's another problem that's affecting more than just Python too: grapheme clusters. It turns out that even a sequence of scalars (code points excluding surrogates) isn't always a safe abstraction anymore.