[mindcrime]

Wait, you're saying you'd prefer undocumented bugs and a constant stream of breaking changes to the runtime that force you to constantly port and report existing, working code?

I don't get it... the Java way seems pretty right to me. That said, I will allow that they might have been a little bit too rigid about not allowing breaking changes. At the very least this policy has resulted in Java evolving more slowly than it might have otherwise. But I don't necessarily find that to be unacceptable, all things told.

[mbell]

I prefer that bugs get fixed when found.

In my experience the Java way is 'oh, a bug, well, that's a bug defined in the spec so we can't fix it now, we'll make a note for the next version'...5 years pass.

The 'I don't want to touch working code' argument is another strange Javaism. If you expect your code to not rot your going to have to constantly maintain it anyway.

[gear54rus]

And sadly, it seems the same with JS. Year 2015:

  x = null;
  typeof x; //object
  x.a = 1;  //TypeError: x is null