If I have a problem with Firefox and switch to Chrome, that addresses my problem and is a solution; yet it isn't a fix! When I use words like "address", I'm specifically being weasely, avoiding the word "fix". :)
> The whole reason to maintain backwards compatibility is so you don't end up in this situation.
That's the ideal, which ignores the negative aspects of absolute backward compatibility. Very good backward compatibility most of the time is all round better than perfect, absolute backward compatibility.
If you want perfect backward compatibility and an excellent design everywhere, then you have to make only perfect design decisions in everything right from the start.
Dennis Ritchie regretted not fixing the precedence of the & operator in C. It's strangely low because at one time there had been no logical && operator and & was used in its place. He wanted to fix it, but, alas, the story goes, they already had several hundred kilobytes of C code written across three machine installations. The result: a piece of technical debt spread to immeasurable numbers of lines of C written since, world over.
> I don't know why you're acting like it's hard to find uses of the tokens "curl" and "wget" in ps1 files.
Simply because I'm thinking of the whole class of possible backward-incompatible changes in a language or library, not all of which can be necessarily found this way. For the ones which can be found by looking for specific identifiers, you need reliable release notes to tell you what they are.
> The whole reason to maintain backwards compatibility is so you don't end up in this situation.
That's the ideal, which ignores the negative aspects of absolute backward compatibility. Very good backward compatibility most of the time is all round better than perfect, absolute backward compatibility.
If you want perfect backward compatibility and an excellent design everywhere, then you have to make only perfect design decisions in everything right from the start.
Dennis Ritchie regretted not fixing the precedence of the & operator in C. It's strangely low because at one time there had been no logical && operator and & was used in its place. He wanted to fix it, but, alas, the story goes, they already had several hundred kilobytes of C code written across three machine installations. The result: a piece of technical debt spread to immeasurable numbers of lines of C written since, world over.
> I don't know why you're acting like it's hard to find uses of the tokens "curl" and "wget" in ps1 files.
Simply because I'm thinking of the whole class of possible backward-incompatible changes in a language or library, not all of which can be necessarily found this way. For the ones which can be found by looking for specific identifiers, you need reliable release notes to tell you what they are.