Development quotes of the week

I understand things change and thus the underlying libraries need to change too. For some reason there those projects which can, for the most part, add modern features without breaking old applications, while others have to break stuff. Linux is a prime example -- applications statically linked decades ago still run today. X had a time when it was actively developed, new features where added, and all of its user facing interfaces continued to support older applications. I just don't understand why that has to be so different today.

Mind you, I very much agree with the sentiment that "structures in API is bad practice" and various other bad practices -- if you are designing an API from scratch. It's completely different however if the API already exists and has thousands of users. In this case the "possible mistakes" have to be weighed against the cost of change. Especially the example I gave. The "error prone" API was in place for years with apparently no issue, so clearly it wasn't such a big and immediate problem to fix.