Re: Question about massive API changes

On Saturday 28 January 2006 17:13, Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
> My opinion is rather extreme: if Ruby is already at a point where
> something in the stdlib can't be improved without a fork, it might be
> time to start shopping for a new language.

Well, I don't entirely understand this point of view, but I think I know what 
you mean.

> If you're familiar with Java, you'll know how crazy it is to browse
> the standard library.  Partly this is because things marked for

Yeah.  That is a different sort of backwards compatibility, though.  I'm 
considering deprecating an entire *package*.  But, as I said, I'm still 
trying to find a reasonable way through this.

> If the library does get renamed, I'd vote to have the old "REXML1"
> library dropped from the distribution.  That makes it clear that
> things have changed, without silently breaking old code.  Old code

That's the thing.  If REXML (current) stays in there for a while, nothing 
breaks.  Maybe I generate some warnings when you require it.  At the same 
time, I introduce XML, which has the optimizations.  For a while, they live 
side by side.  Then, in Ruby 3.0, REXML disappears.

If I'm going to break applications, I want to give a lot of warning.

> significantly.  I can't readily think of a language that had a
> "compatibility or else" restriction when doing a major revision that
> turned out to make people happy.
> Java 1.0 -> 1.5, C -> C++, Perl -> Perl 6, etc, etc.

Java 1.0 -> 1.5 didn't break anything.  Java 1.0 code is legal 1.5 code.  And 
C++ isn't so much an upgrade to C as an entirely different language.  I can't 
speak to Perl, because... well... I stopped using Perl about the same time I 
discovered Ruby.

I understand what you're saying.  It is the easiest, most efficient solution 
for developers, but it is a major pain for people using the library.  And 
I'll get the hate mail. :-)

-- 
--- SER

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