I don't think it is circular, if the compiler never changes, a new compiler (for a new language) will come out. New generations might find the unchanged compile

I don't think it is circular, if the compiler never changes, a new compiler (for a new language) will come out. New generations might find the unchanged compiler to be obsolete (as many think of C). Thus its future might be mitigated. I don't believe introducing backwards incompatible changes is such a big thing that developers have significantly less time to develop new features. Look at Ruby 1.8->1.9 and Rails 2->3, yes it was a pain to upgrade, for a little while. But the advantages are obvious, and it was not _that_ much work. I was looking at github specifically because of their 'fork me' attitude, which I admire. I don't advocate at all we should develop software without looking at the past, if Yehuda didn't look at APT closely when he was working on bundler, then that was a missed opportunity I agree. Do you think Bundler should have somehow been an (compatible) improvement on APT instead of a separate software? I myself have never used APT the way I use bundler, and I have no idea if that would be possible.