Re:Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?
by enriquto on Sunday February 14, 2021 @02:48PM
(#26135566)
Dudes, relax, it's just a heuristic, a rough zeroth-order estimate to measure the pace of evolution of a language.
Re:Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?
by eigenspace on Sunday February 14, 2021 @02:58PM
(#26135666)
Even to zeroth order, this is a bad way to estimate backwards compatability. It's a fine way to estimate pace of language evolution, but that wasn't your claim.
For instance, Fortran 2018 has new features that would fail if you tried to use them in Fortran 2015. However, Fortran 2018 is still backwards compatible with Fortran 2015, and indeed is backwards compatible with Fortran 1977.
That is, in this example Fortran maintains 42 years of backwards compatability, yet only 3 years of forwards compatability.
The two things are effectively decoupled from eachother.
What that person said is very wrong.
I guess that in a language without a good version bounding and manifest system like julia, it could be a semi-valid point because you might end up updating your packages and breaking your code that way, but julia has reproducible package environments, so you can get very strong guarantees about backwards compatibility even when you're updating packages.