Why deprecate? Instead, we should apprecate features! (Humor)

FeepingCreature feepingcreature at gmail.com
Wed Jul 5 07:17:27 UTC 2023


There is a lot of talk on the newsgroup these days about whether 
features should deprecated, and how quickly, and how 
aggressively. Everybody considers that the thing to be done with 
features that don't work well is to mark them for removal, with 
or without a replacement. Why don't we talk more about making 
features better?

I'll tell you why: because there's a word missing from our 
lexicon.

Consider the common confusion between "deprecate" (consider 
unsupported) and "depreciate" (lose in value). Even outside of 
programming, these words are a mess. I deprecate you; however, 
antonymously, I *appreciate* you. Huh?

How would these terms look if they actually make sense? A feature 
is depreciated, so we deprecate it. Conversely: we apprecate a 
feature, so it becomes appreciated.

There's our missing word! std.json doesn't need to be removed, it 
needs to be apprecated: to be made worthy of appreciation. alias 
this, immutable, even autodecoding: if we apprecated, made 
better, these features, we wouldn't need to deprecate anything.

So instead of heaping deprecations upon them, let's all apprecate 
what we have!


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