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by wyager 4368 days ago
>I'd rather be stuck with a language whose designers are very resistant to change vs one that gets features haphazardly bolted on every few years (PHP comes to mind).

I absolutely agree! However, I don't think Rust will continue to go through wild changes for much longer. My guess is that it will settle and become pretty fixed.

And Haskell certainly doesn't introduce breaking changes very often.
3 comments
pcwalton 4368 days ago
> However, I don't think Rust will continue to go through wild changes for much longer. My guess is that it will settle and become pretty fixed.

We're shooting for the end of the year, in fact. You can view the list of backwards incompatible language changes here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?labels=P-backcompat...

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Silhouette 4367 days ago
And Haskell certainly doesn't introduce breaking changes very often.

Actually, I'd say instability is one of the significant challenges with adopting Haskell for long-lived production code. For example, there have been a few discussions in various forums and blogs recently about how much of Real World Haskell no longer even compiles on the latest GHC and current versions of libraries. RWH is a book that rapidly became the go-to text for new Haskell developers only a few years ago, so we're not talking about either bleeding edge functionality or a length of time where software written back then has probably been retired here.

So stability is perhaps an area where Go does have an advantage over the likes of Rust and Haskell today. Rust is still evolving as a new language inevitably will; it has not yet reached the level of stability needed for long-term production use by the general programming community. Haskell is also still evolving, but for a different reason: it is valued as much for being a test bed of bleeding edge programming language design as it is for being a practical programming language.

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codygman 4367 days ago
To be fair Real World Haskell was written in November 2008, and IIRC that syntax was valid up to GHC 7.6.3 (needs citation) or 21 April 2013.
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dscrd 4367 days ago
>And Haskell certainly doesn't introduce breaking changes very often.

Perhaps Haskell the core language doesn't but ghc certainly does, in every major version.

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