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I object to you claim of Scala developers "not taking backward compatibility so seriously" and the "lax attitude". Just compare Oracle's approach–of letting an

I object to you claim of Scala developers "not taking backward compatibility so seriously" and the "lax attitude". Just compare Oracle's approach–of letting an employee announce on Twitter that they are changing Generics in Swing, and that people should download a JDK9 build, compile their code and see whether things break–with Scala's approach of automatically and continuously building ~1.000.000 lines of publicly available code against Scala to detect breakages before they happen. Or compare the tools Java/Scala gives you for managing deprecations, both in the library (@deprecated) and external tooling (migration manager). Scala developers go the great lengths to improve and evolve the language while they try to minimize the work needed to move between language versions. See the recent improvements in Eclipse for an example. I also find the comparison with C++ pointless, boring and–to be honest–ridiculous, as well as the remark about "less bad" syntax.

tormeh 12y ago
Oh, yeah, I exaggerate sometimes. Not really planning to stop, honestly. I think Java never breaks compatibility in the core language or standard library, right?
- frowaway001 12y ago
  They started to do that recently.
  - ryanobjc 12y ago
    How exactly? You can still -target 1.4 and there hasn't been any removed APIs.
    - frowaway001 12y ago
      Incompatible changes: - Ongoing changes to method selection within major and minor releases - Various breakages when generics where introduced - Various breakages when Swing was generified in Java 5, 7 and 9 - Change of visibility or removal of methods caused by security issues - Deprecation and upcoming removal of various methods due to modularization plans
pedrow 12y ago
> ... letting an employee announce on Twitter that they are changing Generics in Swing I hadn't heard that - could you point me to a reference please?
- adriaanm 12y ago
  I believe that would be https://twitter.com/jddarcy/status/493137546814042112 https://twitter.com/jddarcy/status/493137546814042112

tormeh 12y ago

Oh, yeah, I exaggerate sometimes. Not really planning to stop, honestly. I think Java never breaks compatibility in the core language or standard library, right?

frowaway001 12y ago
They started to do that recently.
- ryanobjc 12y ago
  How exactly? You can still -target 1.4 and there hasn't been any removed APIs.
  - frowaway001 12y ago
    Incompatible changes: - Ongoing changes to method selection within major and minor releases - Various breakages when generics where introduced - Various breakages when Swing was generified in Java 5, 7 and 9 - Change of visibility or removal of methods caused by security issues - Deprecation and upcoming removal of various methods due to modularization plans

pedrow 12y ago

> ... letting an employee announce on Twitter that they are changing Generics in Swing I hadn't heard that - could you point me to a reference please?

adriaanm 12y ago
I believe that would be https://twitter.com/jddarcy/status/493137546814042112 https://twitter.com/jddarcy/status/493137546814042112