> Being forgiving towards the user is one of the important principles of programming. Because the user may not be able to “upgrade” his system. Yes. If there i

> Being forgiving towards the user is one of the important principles of programming. Because the user may not be able to “upgrade” his system. Yes. If there is one thing I wish I could drill into every programmer's head, it's that not breaking stuff for your users is the #1 most important thing. There is one of you, and there may be many thousands of users. You putting in the extra effort means saving thousands of times of effort from your downstream users. Sometimes breakage unavoidable, but those instances should be rare, extremely well communicated, and felt as a failure to be learned from and avoided in the future. I don't care how ugly it makes things for you, your users are paramount.