Deprecation schedule

[Stewart Gordon]

On 26/11/2010 23:44, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
<snip>
> Java marks stuff as deprecated and then _never_ removes it. It makes the
> deprecation a bit of a joke really. Many people continue to use the deprecated
> stuff anyway. A prime example would be that they deprecated Date's most useful
> constructors in an effort to make you use the Calendar stuff. People keep on using
> those constructors anyway, because they don't care about the Calendar stuff, and
> it's a lot more of a pain to use.

Hooray for Phobos's "simple operations should be simple" philosophy!

Another example of a pain in Java is GridBagLayout.  If only Java had 
that philosophy, I suppose GridBagLayout would never have been invented. 
  (Sun did eventually publish something better - TableLayout - but for 
some reason it hasn't become a standard API feature.)

> As far as I know, Sun has _never_ actually
> removed a deprecated function from Java's standard library (and if they haven't
> before, now they never will since they were eaten by Oracle - who knows what
> Oracle will do).

I wonder when/if they're going to get rid of Thread.destroy, which was 
in the API for many years but never implemented.

> Certainly, whatever we do, we don't want to follow Java's route. Hopefully there
> are other languages out there which handle deprecation better.
<snip>

But does Java ever deprecate language features, or only API features? 
In the latter case, it's a matter of other libraries/APIs, not other 
languages.

Stewart.