> there needs to be a way to eventually break backwards compatibility and remove the cruft. Actually, no. There's always a cost/benefit ratio. You can easily c

> there needs to be a way to eventually break backwards compatibility and remove the cruft. Actually, no. There's always a cost/benefit ratio. You can easily create a beautiful, elegant system repateadly forcing backwards incompatibility. In fact, that has been done - see the history of "Plan 9". Even the developers of Unix couldn't just throw away backwards compatibility in the name of elegance at any cost. I think you do sometimes want to break backwards compatibility, but there'd better be a good reason for it & the pain needs to be minimized for users. If users repeatedly undergo pain from a system, they will stop being users. One of the most important rules for the Linux kernel is "don't break userspace".