[Bese-devel] request dispatching

[Wojciech Kaczmarek]

On 14 Mar 2006, at 9:44, Friedrich Dominicus wrote:

> "Attila Lendvai" <attila.lendvai at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Wouldn't that mean that this breaks every existing application?i'm a
>> newcomer to lisp, and one of the most positive aspects of this
>> community is that people tend to not care that much about backward
>> compatibility... i understand that this may be an issue with deployed
>> instances, etc., but there are many ways to handle that.just my
>> 0.02, - attila(alias 101 on irc &no 'its not lisp code :)
> I disagree, backward compatability is not just a game. It's crucial
> for any kind of "serious" investment. Even M$ has gone to extremes to
> keep backward compatbility. As you can see in there income that was a
> wise decision. Now they are drifting away and suddenly people are not
> willing to follow without 'thinking'.
>
> Intel has learned it the hard way also, since they decided to build
> the I64 stuff, AMD has taken away a lot of market share.
>
> The tendency at the moment in the GNU world is unfortunatly, "breaks
> as much as you can", how many packages still use GTK 1.2 because they
> "decided" it's a right thing to break everything.
>
> I like Common Lisp because it is quite stable and I can take code from
> back a few years and have a good chance getting it running even in the
> newer versions. This is also another big plus for C instead of C++.
>
> you just can think that backward-compatiblity is for weenies if you do
> not have large applications. Otherwise you would not write such stuff.

I think you can find (and meet) a significant number of people claiming 
that backward compatibility 'myth' is evil in industry and some 
compatibility practices are leading to a least-common-denominator 
effect, which often kills innovations. I'm not willing to start a flame 
here; please just consider that, in the case of our UCW dispatcher 
changes, one can learn a lot. Fortunately Marco seems keep macros for 
old behaviour so we aren't forced to learn it all right now. Best of 
both worlds.