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0 pointsgarmaine4y ago0 comments

Arguably a language should NEVER have breaking changes large enough to warrant a SemVer major version update. Rename or fork the language if you want to do that. Such major language overhauls in the past have been a huge waste of developer time as they go back to rewrite affected code.

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notfed4y ago

Java 10 introduced "var", which broke code with variables named "var". I'm glad they did not introduce a new language JavaWithVar.

int_19h4y ago

It's not the only two choices available. C# also introduced var back in version 3 (2008), but it did it as a "contextual keyword" - meaning that it remains a valid identifier in any position where it used to be one, even to this day. Pretty much all new C# keywords since the very first version are of this nature:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...

garmaineOP4y ago

That wouldn't be large enough a change to warrant a new major SemVer. I'm talking about things like python2 -> python3.

dragonwriter4y ago

> That wouldn't be large enough a change to warrant a new major SemVer.

Yes, it would. Breaking is breaking.

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halfdan4y ago

It's clear the py2 to py3 migration was painful but I'm curious to hear how you would apply "they should fork / rename the language" here.

To me it just feels like semantics. They said "here's a new major version of python" when they could also have said "we have forked python 2 and we're calling it python 3. We think it's better and we will probably abandon python 2 at some point".

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loo4y ago

python2 -> python3 was just a handful of things like that.

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