Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:45:52 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> For certain values of "break". The application continues to work if the
> application specifies a certain version of python, as it should. I wish
> that python did not allow applications not to specify a version, but
> it's not the first development environment to make it easy for people to
> make mistakes. I think that Java needs the same attention.

You're using a pretty much unique definition of stability there: to most
developers stability implies that it'll be OK to link old programs
against future releases, for the foreseeable future. So GTK+ is stable.

But a program which says "this is stable, because whenever it breaks
backwards compatibility we rename everything" isn't in my mind stable
because old programs cannot be linked against new releases. They don't
benefit from bugfixes, new features that don't require new API etc.

Java was designed to be a stable platform. That's why it doesn't support
parallel installability. The fact that most big Java apps ship their JVM
just reinforces the point that stability in large APIs is:

a) hard
b) something you've got to *really* want

thanks -mike