Though I get the humour and agree with the sentiment, the history of C tells us that a language can massively succeed even with constant "breaking changes". One

Though I get the humour and agree with the sentiment, the history of C tells us that a language can massively succeed even with constant "breaking changes". One of the things I learned working at Coverity is that there is no such language as C or C++; rather, there are hundreds of mutually incompatible languages with those names. Almost no compilers implement any of the standards exactly, and there are so many standards to choose from. The vast majority of real-world line-of-business C programs are designed to work with a single compiler and are therefore never evaluated in terms of their correctness when ported to another compiler. That said, the C# compiler team was and continues to be extremely concerned about breaking changes because we very clearly perceived the cost to customers and the barriers to upgrading entailed by breaking changes. I introduced a handful of deliberate breaking changes in my years on the C# design and compiler team, and every one was agonized over for many hours by members of the design team who were experts on the likely customer impacts.