Breaking backwards compatiblity

[Nick Sabalausky]

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
news:mailman.456.1331450402.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 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.)
>

*cough*DMD*cough*