Backwards compatibility

Backwards compatibility

Posted Mar 27, 2010 22:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Resetting PHP 6 by drag
Parent article: Resetting PHP 6

The big difference between Perl 6, PHP 6, and Python3 is that Python3 is out right now, avialable, has a bunch of transition tools, code is somewhat backwards compatible to 2.6, and it's had a couple stablizing releases.

But "somewhat backwards compatible" is not good enough. For any non-trivial applications you still need to test everything again, and probably do some coding + testing + deploying. In business settings it translates to money and pains; in volunteer projects just pains.

Even when backwards compatibility is a requirement, like for Java (where the rare breakages are clearly signaled and known by everyone), testing time for new versions has to be allocated. With Python migrations are a showstopper for most people unless the new version somehow provides great advantages (which for me it doesn't). For developers of the language itself and the runtime, the supposed benefits of not having to be backwards compatible are probably offset by having to support two or three versions indefinitely.

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