Re:Windows 11: Just say no
by ryandrake on Friday September 17, 2021 @01:20PM
(#28568120)
Great point! It's an ecosystem-wide problem. I'd go even further to argue it's a problem baked into the very psyches of software developers. Your remote storage service should not be changing, particularly in ways that break backward compatibility. Nobody should be dropping IPv4. Nobody should be rewriting a library in such a way the new one is incompatible unless the old one retains support. Nobody should be forcing you to migrate to some crappier version that looks like shit.
Stop changing things just to change them. But if you're actually changing for a good reason, consider the downstream effects of your changes.
I can take a bash script from 20, maybe 30 years ago, and know that it will still do what it's supposed to do, and all the standard commands it calls, like sed, awk, and grep will also do what they are supposed to do. Bits don't rot by themselves. Careless developers in the ecosystem make changes and don't consider backward compatibility, and we euphemistically call it "bit rot."
Stop changing things just to change them. But if you're actually changing for a good reason, consider the downstream effects of your changes.
I can take a bash script from 20, maybe 30 years ago, and know that it will still do what it's supposed to do, and all the standard commands it calls, like sed, awk, and grep will also do what they are supposed to do. Bits don't rot by themselves. Careless developers in the ecosystem make changes and don't consider backward compatibility, and we euphemistically call it "bit rot."