Seven years is not a long time. My toaster is older than that, and I like to think the people who made that would be embarrassed if those cheap moving parts had decayed so quickly.

You probably have enough horsepower at your disposal to emulate each and every computer you ever bought (simultaneously!) and run all that software forever. But instead we're going to require any tool you want to use to be rewritten half a dozen times over the course of your career alone. And why? Because fuck you, we just can't be bothered to start taking engineering seriously.

If bread had changed as much as GPUs have in the past seven years, your toaster would be obsolete, too.

This isn't about good engineering vs bad, this is about mature technology vs a rapidly developing field. Different characteristics beget different engineering trade offs.

Cars are switching from petrol to hybrid to electric motors, but roads still work... "Rapidly developing" is a red herring.

Bad analogy.

Car engines and transmissions are the heart of the vehicle, and those change frequently as well. Roads are a fundamental, static, landscape feature today. They're like telephone poles and fiber conduits, neither of which have changed much in recent times.

Software APIs change to match the features/needs of the users and developers. Part of this is based on the changing hardware, part on desired features. The hardware today is vastly different than when OpenGL 1.1/1.5 was available so why should we be constrained to use it in the same fashion?

In short, APIs shouldn't be static for now and forever, we'd only be limiting ourselves and ignoring the fact that sometimes things change and sometimes early decisions were wrong (or less effective than desired).

Roads still work because they are too expensive to replace. GPU's and bread are not, so your argument does not make sense.

Expensive things are more likely to work? I can tell you've not worked long in this industry, my friend.

I think that paraphrase was slightly closer to the opposite of what tinco said than what he did say.

>Cars are switching from petrol to hybrid to electric motors, but roads still work...

Yes, and this is what makes this a bad analogy.

He's got the whole analogy inverted. If roads were rapidly changing, we'd need dramatically different cars to handle the new roads.

Touché: I apparently wanted "OpenGL 1.5", not 2.0. This, in fact, undermines part of my argument regarding the major version number. Further, reading through the history and timeline a bit better, I am now concerned I was horribly misinformed. I would just ignore my comment.