Breaking backwards compatiblity

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 10:41:48PM -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/10/2012 1:20 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >It's no fun at all if you had to wait 2 hours just to find out you
> >screwed up some parameters in your test render. Imagine if you had to
> >wait 2 hours to know the result of every 1 line code change.
> 
> 2 hours? Man, you got good service. When I submitted my punched card
> decks, I'd be lucky to get a result the next day!
> 
> (Yes, I did learn to program using punch cards. And to be fair, the
> programs were trivial compared with the behemoths we write today.)

And also today, the complexity of the compile/link process can lead to
dainbramaged makefiles that sometimes fail to recompile a changed
source, and the linker picks up leftover junk .o's from who knows how
many weeks ago, causing heisenbugs that don't exist in the source code
but persistently show up in the binary until you rm -rf the entire
source tree, checkout a fresh copy from the repos, reapply your changes,
and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. (And that's assuming that in
the meantime somebody didn't check in something that doesn't compile, or
that introduces new and ingenious ways of breaking the system.)

So perhaps the turnaround time has improved, but the frustration level
has also increased. :-)


T

-- 
The best way to destroy a cause is to defend it poorly.