Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't see the point of using semver (or at least telling us about the same guarantees) and then not making use of it.

If there were 10 breaking chances we should be at 11.x now, not at 1.x with 20 environment variables.




From a purist perspective, you're right - the contract has been broken, and a major version should've been incremented.

However, Go has always been more of a pragmatic than a purist language. For example, they've analyzed tons of code and found that most of them had bugs caused by having `for` loop with a single variable being mutated. So they changed the `for` loop (in a technically backwards incompatible way) in order to make all those bugs disappear. In a way, they modified the formal contract to make it more aligned with the de-facto contract that users were expecting.

I personally think that kind of pragmatism beats purism any day. Maybe the fact that I've never personally been affected by Go backwards incompatibilities also plays a role... But I've yet to find a single person who has :)


This has nothing to do with pragmatism. Just update the version number. This is the pragmatic way.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: