On Sep 28, 2011, at 1:26 AM, Sean Corfield wrote: > On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 12:03 AM, Arthur Edelstein > <arthuredelst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> You may think >> I'm doing it wrong, but I don't think I'm alone at all. > > I don't think you're doing anything wrong - and I'm sure many people > only do minimal research on tools they use. I just think your > expectations of Clojure the language are unrealistic, in terms of > maintaining total compatibility with the myriad third party (and > sometimes unmaintained) libraries. > > For comparison, Scala went thru a lot of binary compatibility issues > in the transition from 2.7 to 2.8, to the point that even milestone > builds were not always compatible with each other. This meant the > entire tool chain had to be rebuilt on almost every milestone build. > Apparently there were a few similar bumps on the transition to 2.9 (I > don't know for sure: I lived thru the 2.7 to 2.8 debacle and chose not > to go to 2.9). > > I hear similar stories for other fast-evolving languages. I think it's > just a fact of life with "new" technologies - and we pay that price > for being early adopters.
FWIW, similarly, despite an intent of backwards compatibility, Python has had migration costs and small backward compatibility niggles for every single major release (2.2 -> 2.3, 2.3 -> 2.4, and so on) ever since I've been involved with it, which is...I dunno, more than 10 years now? My current project doesn't use 2.7 yet because the cost/benefit hasn't been there yet. And, of course, the switch to Python 3 intentionally broke backwards compatibility. Every major project I've been involved with had to set aside some not-insignificant amount of time to migrate our own code base, determine what to do with dependencies, and even help migrating some of the dependencies. We have said exactly the same sorts of things that Arthur is saying. :-) And then replied to ourselves with the same sorts of things that Sean is saying. Perhaps Java has been different, but the languages I use and follow have not, with the exception of JavaScript. I perceive it to be a mildly unfortunate fact of life at this point. Gary -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
