Some seldom used standard modules have been deprecated and later removed. Like recently I revisited a project I initially made using v3.6, but it broke on v3.13 due to an indirect dependency no longer present in the stdlib. It was a simple fix though as a quick search identified the issue and pointed to the removed module in a package on PyPI.
Python 3.6 is from 2016 and 3.13 is from 2024. Similar things happen on most platforms on this timescale, eg on the Java side[1], you'd be going from Java 8 to Java 23.
Clojure is pretty good even on that timescale though.
I often see people recommending Python as a replacement for Bash scripts (utilizing common Unix tools like grep and awk). I'm pretty sure a script from 2016 will still be working fine now.
> I'm pretty sure a bash script from 2016 will still be working fine now.
In some environments, yes. A bunch of platforms have started using bash-compatible (but not actually bash) shells like fish to help with startup performance. Apple has upgraded from a truly ancient version of bash to a somewhat-modern one in that time (and then gone all-in on zsh instead). Things change on the scale of a decade.
And yet, if the script is written to POSIX sh standards and has the #!/bin/sh shebang line, none of that breaks.
Yes, of course, things do change incompatibly in a decade, probably including some of the nonstandard platform-specific commands called by the script regardless of which dialect of shell. But people who use a nonstandard shell dialect - however common it might be at the time of writing - should be prepared for that shell to become uncommon, absent by default, installed at a different path, incompatibly changed, or otherwise unusable a decade later to an extent that people writing to the standard do not.
Yeah, it's nothing crazy, but it makes upgrades a lot more unpredictable. It's harder to communicate to management why the 3.x update took a day and the 3.y upgrade took a whole quarter.
It's harder to upgrade services in a central way with any amount of leverage, and generally requires more coordination overhead, and moving more carefully.
Compare with, say, golang, where it's pretty much a non-issue. My experience with Ruby was a lot better too, until Ruby 3, but hey, that was a major version bump!
