[chc]

Ruby and Python each did one release where they were willing to do significant changes. That's it — they're not doing it again for a good long while now. It's an isolated incident, not a trend in those languages' development practices that we can project into the future.

Go did breaking changes pre-1.0, but they are now committed to providing a stable platform that only accretes features (http://golang.org/doc/go1compat).

[stormbrew]

I don't expect either of them to do it for a while either. The trends I'm talking about are in PL development in general. More breaking evolution is taking place post-initial-development than ever has before in languages both new and old.

Note that the Go compat wiki you link to acknowledges a future Go 2 that may break compatibility. That's actually a pretty strongly pro-evolution statement compared to past languages.

[chc]

The statement you were questioning is that Swift will be "fixed for a decade at least" after release. If you agree that it will be at least four years before Python makes any more changes like Python 3, then you are agreeing with the OP.

[stormbrew]

I'm noting an acceleration in recent years and believing in the possibility of further acceleration going forward. Part of that being newer languages being more willing to undergo breaking changes sooner in their evolution than older ones were. Thus, I agree that Python might stay at a big change every ten years (which would still be faster than historical language evolution!) while still believing that swift or go might go for faster than that.

It's also worth noting that Swift isn't even at 1.0 yet, and they've said there will be changes before release. So I also disagree with a somewhat hysterical "we'll be stuck with this!!11!!" right now.

It's all just guesses, though. We'll see.