On 31 October 2015 at 14:15, Wayne Werner <waynejwer...@gmail.com> wrote: > First, do no harm, eh?
I haven't had time to watch it yet so I don't have the full context of the observation, but that's only true if current users are considered categorically more important than future users. That's a dangerous line of thinking, as it means the cognitive burden of learning a language and ecosystem can only ever grow, and never shrink (since superseded concepts are never pruned from the set of things you need to learn, and you're also never really able to fix design mistakes resulting from limited perspectives in early iterations). Large scale migration projects like the shift away from implementation defined behaviour in the Python packaging ecosystem are cases where reducing barriers to entry for *new* users has edged out compatibility for existing users as a priority - the latter is still important, it's just acceptable for the level of compatibility to be less than 100%. Regards, Nick. P.S. From a medical perspective, there are certainly cases were doctors *do* inflict a lesser harm (e.g. amputations) to avoid a greater harm (e.g. death). "We saved the limb, but lost the patient" isn't one of the available options. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
