Thoughts on stability

[alilleybrinker]

Stability is good, but a complete guarantee of backwards compatibility can lock in bad decisions forever.

The solutions to this are, to my mind:

• Do new major versions periodically;
• Do them often enough that they are part of the expectation and people get used to planning for them;
• Also make those major versions as painless as possible;
• Whenever you can, offer automatic code-correction tools which move from one version to the next, or (where pure automation fails) provide explicit direction for how to manage the transition

I seem to recall Ember.js handling this stuff well.