like apple?

October 2001 - Original iPod - FireWire

April 2003 - Third-Generation iPod - 30-pin Dock Connector

September 2012 - iPhone 5 - Lightning Connector

Apple Laptops

1998 - PowerBook G3 - Unnamed Circular Power Connector

2001 - PowerBook G4 - Smaller Unnamed Circular Power Connector

2006 - MagSafe

2012 - MagSafe 2

Constant change is a thing that doesn't get enough mindshare as well. Not training your team at handling change is probably as bad as not having programmers care about backwards compatibility.

To be quite clear: I think it is very beautiful to have 2 languages in the same space, evolving into different community directions.

My opinion is that Python projects are simply more likely to have more mature release processes because Python is more likely to be used by mature engineers than Ruby.

> Python is more likely to be used by mature engineers than Ruby.

It is very sad that you waste a good post for such an ungrounded attack.

For the record, the last time I wrote Ruby code was about 4 days ago, and the last time I wrote Python code was yesterday afternoon. I'm a part of both communities and I think that there are a lot of people who are. From my experiences in both communities, I think that the Python community is much more mature and professional.

But we ignore one important thing here and that is the lesson! People need to learn something from the Python story!

Moving forward with an evolving concept, requires the (mathematical) coherence of all ideas. You cannot invent a spoken language, then break it and say now we speak a different dialect, because we use 2 words less this way. Nobody will adopt, not because the feature of reducing verbosity and increasing expressiveness is actually bad, but because the new concept branches out and technically seen it's "noise", because it adds more without integrating it. You can throw a second motor into a car, but without integrating the second motor, you will have no benefit. Python has to learn this the hard way, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson made a decision for the C programming language about 40 years ago and all of the C code written back then can still be compiled, albeit some things have changed and require minor changes. But this is something you can introduce in a timespan of 40 years. You cannot make a new present every 5 years and say, that all many of the old presents you've made back then, have to be given back, when you accept the new present. Coherence and Evolution are powers that's use should unify and only diversify when required or requested by the diffusion of technology into the userbase.

I think HN is the community that most loudly would agree with new != better but that's exactly what we do wrong. Holy cow, I can't explain how much value we have at our disposal that we throw away + pay to keep it away comfortably. New businesses don't integrate old people, because they don't really know how to make value out of them. That's a simple equation, if you see it this way. It's not because old people cannot contribute to the development of IT, Startups and the Hacker scene. We just have no business model, not even a concept that considers these elder men and women.

I can't really say how ruby does it because I haven't use ruby much.

Now, I work primarily with Python 2.7, with migration to 3 being a distant pipe dream. After years of Rubying, I find it a bit old-fashioned, awkward and occasionally infuriating (strings default to ASCII? srsly?) -- but I do appreciate knowing that I will not have to rewrite everything anytime soon.

But one has to realize that 1.8 was the series of Ruby that was started _before_ Ruby even got popular (I started Ruby using 1.6, which was even more problematic). So being aggressive in breaking stuff with the next iteration (basically, to do it proper, with more manpower and data to work on) also opened up a lot - for example, Ruby 1.9 to 2.0 is a much simpler switch and I have many clients running 2.0 now and testing on 2.1.

The fear I always have with python 2.7 is the distant future. It just irritates me to have a huge migration in front of me. The Rubyist in me wants to keep up with the current state of things.