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On Saturday 28 January 2006 12:26, dblack / wobblini.net wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jan 2006, Sean E. Russell wrote:
> > Personally, I think that breaking legacy code is the *worst* kind of
...
> What's a good antonym for "agile"? :-)

Hey, I have hella respect for apps that are "done."  There's a lot of merit 
for tools that address their scope, and do it well enough that they just do 
their job without constant attention.

But, yeah... that's normally the exception rather than the rule.

> It's an issue, but ultimately I think the constituency that should be
> served by the language, as the language evolves, is the constituency
> of people who have access to their machines and can update things,
> make conscious decisions about what to install, etc.  Once you start
> getting into things like the ethics of consultants, it's going to be
> impossible on a consistent or long-term basis for the language to do
> anything one way or the other.

Sorry I brought up the ethics situation.  Seriously, though, what sort of 
penetration is Ruby going to have if it becomes seen as unreliable?  And I 
don't know about you, but IME consultant positions outnumber permanent 
positions about seven to one (from an informal scan of my inbox).

Anyway, that's sort of beyond my ability to address. Suffice it to say that 
I'd *prefer* to limit the breakage, because I hate that sort of breakage when 
it happens to me.  I have too many little apps that I've written, that I use, 
that do the jobs I want them to -- it is irritating when I have to constantly 
tweak them just because something changed in the runtime.  It is why I 
largely depend on natively compiled languages whenever I'm doing any 
"serious" work for clients -- they tend to have fewer dependencies.

> I've always understood the situation to be that Matz wants to break as
> little as possible before 2.0, and as much as possible all at the same
> time when 2.0 comes out.

So... you're in favor of breaking REXML in 1.9, rather than duplicating it?

-- 
--- SER

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, 
more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some 
great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach 
their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned 
by a downright moron."        -  H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

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