Compatibility is tough and we've really just barely started to deal with it, but I think so far it's going pretty well. Multiple dispatch is uncannily good at deprecating things, and having a dynamic language with nice metaprogramming makes it possible to do clever things like Compat.jl, which makes it much easier to the language. Changes will slow down once we hit 1.0, but they shouldn't stop. If we can make transitions between major versions relatively painless, then we'll be able to continue to innovate without getting stuck between versions the way Perl and Python have (for quite opposite reasons). The Ruby transition from 1.8 to 2.0 is a good model – they broke some things, but not so much that the language became unfamiliar, and the pain of switching was more than fairly compensated for by better performance and features that make the language more pleasant to use. People should be excited about upgrading, not dread it.
On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 3:51 AM, Tamas Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 18 2014, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimi...@club.fr> wrote: > > >> the weirdest part is that there are some people who seem to > >> enjoy *really* helping users, all the while being somewhat > >> insulting. it is my (incomplete) understanding that internal > >> strife in the core development team has become negative, too. > >> it will be up to the julia core team to set the community > >> standard and watch themselves and the community to keep it > >> alive. > > > > Indeed, apart from the harsh tone on the R mailing lists (I couldn't > > have described it better than Ivo did), the factor that I think drives > > developers away from R is the idea that "it's documented, so it's not a > > bug and doesn't need to change". For some time you try to contribute > > improvements to the project, but at some point you get tired of trying > > to convince core developers just to be able to help somewhere. Result: > > While I agree with the above description of the R community, we should > take the context into account: R itself comes from S-plus, and there is > quite a bit of legacy code that they would not want to break with > incompatible changes. Hopefully Julia will never get ossified like this. > > Best, > > Tamas >
