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When Do You Kiss Backwards Compatibility Goodbye?

Posted by Cliff on from the ditching-all-of-that-old-baggage dept.

Arandir asks: "Backwards compatibility is great for users. But it sucks for developers. After a while your normally sensible and readable code becomes a nightmare spaghetti tangle of conditions, macros and multiple reinventions of the wheel. Eventually you have to kiss off backwards compatibility as more trouble than it's worth. The question is, when? Should my code conform to POSIX.1 or Single UNIX 2? Should I expect the user to have a ISO Standard C++ compiler? What about those users with SunOS-4.1.4, Slackware-3.2, and FreeBSD-2.2?" This question is really kind of difficult to answer in the general sense. The best advice one can give, of course, is "when you can get away with it". Not much help, that, but the lost of backwards compatibility, like most complex decisions, depends on a lot of factors. The key factor in most developers eyes, of course, is the bottom line. Have many of you been faced with this decision? What logic did you use to come to your decision and what suggestions do you have for others who might find themself in this predicament?

1 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Arrogance by Veteran · · Score: 3, Redundant
    Much of 'throw out the old cruft' is simply arrogance on the part of new developers: "These guys didn't know what they were doing" implying of course that "we are much better than they were".

    Old code is hard to read - even if it is your code - because you lack the overall 'grasp' of what the code is doing - which the developer had had when it was written. Old code becomes just lines of code instead of part of an intelligent structure; you can see the 'trees' but the 'forest' has been lost.

    This means that the problem with old code is that YOU don't know what the developers were doing; not that THE DEVELOPERS didn't know what they were doing!

    It is a very easy mistake to confuse those two types of ignorance. Add in a little 'it can't be me that is wrong' attitude and the name of the game becomes a contemptuous 'out with the old in with the new.'

    The truth is that there are differences in skill levels of programmers - old code written by good programmers is a lot better than new code written by poorer quality programers. If you didn't know that programmers differ in skill level it is conclusive proof that you are not a good programmer; to a bad programmer all code looks the same - that is why a bad programmer is a bad programmer