On Sep 28, 2011, at 7:20 PM, Arthur Edelstein wrote: > So what's the plan for the future? Are there plans to make clojure > stable at some point so that backward compatibility can be expected? > Otherwise I am going to have difficulty continuing to advocate clojure > to my colleagues. In other words, when will the library ecosystem be > considered important enough not to break?
I don't think there will (nor should) ever be a declaration by the core team that "from this point onward, we will never break backwards compatibility." There's always a trade-off between maintaining backwards compatibility and making improvements to the language. Naturally, as the language matures the tradeoff will shift towards compatibility, but in my opinion it would be foolish to set anything in stone. I don't think the lack of any such promise has hurt Python, for example; and while the transition to 3.0 certainly seems to have been slow and painful, I don't doubt the language will survive. > I think a statement of the policies of the Clojure/Core team (perhaps > spelled out on the website) concerning stability and backward > compatibility would really help those of us who want to be able to > rely on Clojure. I think the absence of such a statement makes it clear that although breaking backwards compatibility is obviously bad, the core team is making no hard-and-fast promises. This seems consistent with what other dynamic languages are doing, and is a Good Thing for the language in my view. -- 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
