The Importance of Compatibility

I was recently listening to the No Dogma Podcast and they had Jared Parsons, the C# Compiler Lead at Microsoft on. He said something that got stuck in my head.

They were talking about potentially deprecating parts of the C# language and Parsons responded with:

People underestimate the value compatibility has to customers

He's right, developers rely on the core functionality of languages remaining the same. It makes updating libraries and language versions much easier to do. Companies rely on being able to maintain and update their software. It gets very difficult to modify, update and maintain software if upgrade paths require massive rewrites.

It was an interesting interview and you can listen to the Episode 1 and Episode 2 here.