Mon 26 Feb 2007
Why Changing "Just This One Thing" Can Lead To Tears
Posted at 20:21 +1100
Apropos of nothing in particular (I was looking for something totally different and typed in a lazy Google query), I stumbled across a quote Guido van Rossum made last year:
"This is an illustration of the dilemma of maintaining a popular language: Everybody hates change (me too!) but everybody also has one thing that's bothering them so much they absolutely want it to be changed. If you were to implement all those personal pet peeves, you'd get a language that's more different from Python than Python is from Fortran." — from the python-dev archives
Too true, and it strikes me that this doesn't just apply to Python. It is also very true for any large system with a userbase. This isn't an argument against change, but it's a rationale for why caution is a good idea.
Topics: software/django, software/python