> Nobody has to worry about ignoring deprecation warnings in libcurl, or for that matter in C, in English, in Unicode, or in linear algebra. There's no point at

> Nobody has to worry about ignoring deprecation warnings in libcurl, or for that matter in C, in English, in Unicode, or in linear algebra. There's no point at which your linear algebra theorems stop working because the AMS has deprecated some postulates. Euclid's theorems still work just as well today as they did 2000 years ago. Better, in fact, because we now know of new things they apply to that Euclid couldn't have imagined. You can still read Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or even Cicero without having to "maintain" them first, though admittedly you have to be careful about interpreting them with the right version of language. I mean, that last part really unravels your point. Linguistic meanings definitely drift significantly over time in ways that are vitally important, and there are no deprecation warnings about them. Take the second amendment to the USA constitution, for example. It seems very obviously scoped to “well-regulated militias”, but there are no end to the number of gun ownership proponents who will insist that this isn’t what was meant when it was written, and that the commas don’t introduce a dependent clause like they do today. Take the Ten Commandments in the Bible. It seems very obvious that they prohibit killing people, but there are no end to the number of death penalty proponents who are Christian who will insist that what it really prohibits is murder, of which state killings are out of scope, and that “thou shalt not kill” isn’t really what was meant when it was written. These are very clearly meaningful semantic changes. Compatibility was definitely broken. If “you have to be careful about interpreting them with the right version of the language”, then how is that any different to saying “well just use the right version of the Python interpreter”? > Today I opened up a program I had written in Python not 2000 years ago, not 200 years ago, not even 20 years ago, but only 11 years ago, and not touched since then. I had to fix a bunch of errors the Python maintainers intentionally introduced into my program in the 2-to-3 transition. In your own words: You have to be careful about interpreting it with the right version of the language. Just use a Python 2 interpreter if that is your attitude. I don’t believe software is something that you can write once and assume it will work in perpetuity with zero maintenance. Go doesn’t work that way, JavaScript doesn’t work that way, and Curl – the subject of this article – doesn’t work that way. They might’ve released v7.16.0 eighteen years ago, but they still needed to release new versions over and over and over again since then. There is no software in the world that does not require maintenance – even TeX received an update a few years ago. Wanting to avoid maintenance altogether is not achievable, and in fact is harmful. This is like sysadmins who are proud of long uptimes. It just proves they haven’t installed any security patches. Regularly maintaining software is a requirement for it to be healthy. Write-once-maintain-never is unhealthy and should not be a goal.