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It's a tough situation. Once you have an installed base, your hands get tied. I miss the early days when I could rework the UI and UX of the product regularly.

It's a tough situation. Once you have an installed base, your hands get tied. I miss the early days when I could rework the UI and UX of the product regularly. Now there is a lot of legwork to make sure we're not changing existing workflows (documented or undocumented). That said, I like that we're making money, so I can't complain too much. I viscerally understand how companies can get stuck and unable to change their products significantly because their installed base will revolt. It's a tough situation.

topspin 2y ago
It's a self inflicted situation by dependees. Tools in widespread use, JupyterLab for instance, has users tossing dependencies onto the pile, offering next to no guidance on dependency version control, as if expecting them to have to ponder such issues is unreasonable. Well, if that's how you're going to behave, foregoing entirely obvious and solved engineering problems, you get to glue all the pieces back together when reality asserts itself. I don't imagine for one minute numpy folks didn't know what this would look like, and they did it anyway. Good on them. Breaking changes are necessary. That's unqualified. Necessary. If you can't afford a big blowup in your work then manage your work.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  One of the reasons I made pip-chill was to have a tool to make it easy to me to have a minimal set of non-versioned requirements for canary builds on the latest-and-greatest versions. When the canary breaks, you realise you have work to do.
rbanffy 2y ago
This is a symptom of cruft. Clean breaks are needed to keep software fresh. The Tree of Elegance needs to be refreshed with the blood of both users and programers. Or something like that.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Cruft is also known as stability. We'd not get very far is the Linux Kernel made breaking ABI changes every year.

topspin 2y ago

It's a self inflicted situation by dependees. Tools in widespread use, JupyterLab for instance, has users tossing dependencies onto the pile, offering next to no guidance on dependency version control, as if expecting them to have to ponder such issues is unreasonable. Well, if that's how you're going to behave, foregoing entirely obvious and solved engineering problems, you get to glue all the pieces back together when reality asserts itself. I don't imagine for one minute numpy folks didn't know what this would look like, and they did it anyway. Good on them. Breaking changes are necessary. That's unqualified. Necessary. If you can't afford a big blowup in your work then manage your work.

rbanffy 2y ago
One of the reasons I made pip-chill was to have a tool to make it easy to me to have a minimal set of non-versioned requirements for canary builds on the latest-and-greatest versions. When the canary breaks, you realise you have work to do.

rbanffy 2y ago

This is a symptom of cruft. Clean breaks are needed to keep software fresh. The Tree of Elegance needs to be refreshed with the blood of both users and programers. Or something like that.

llm_trw 2y ago
Cruft is also known as stability. We'd not get very far is the Linux Kernel made breaking ABI changes every year.