Um, I'm not sure I completely agree with that assessment Richard, at least the way I'm reading it.
All langauges change, and Lc doesn't appear to change less to me than almost any other I can think of. Leaving aside for the moment whether all the changes are good or bad regardless of language, here are the things specifically I was thinking about.
FourthWorld wrote: Tue Aug 07, 2018 4:23 pm
... once we step outside our world, we find a universe in which backward compatibility is handled with cavalier disregard, so frequently by so many languages that many think painful, efforts to make scripts compatible with the most recent version of whatever engine one's using is completely normal and as good as it gets.
What most people might think of as a "painful language" as you put it I am guessing would be something like C/C++ or maybe assembly would be an even better example (since it is processor type specific).
Yet as long as C/C++ has been around, you could pick up probably any current compiler and still write code just as you did in C from say the 80s [*]. You would loose out for not using new features, but the structure really is pretty backwards compatible.
SmallTalk - has this ever changed, other than to get faster and smaller?
Other less painful languages such as any number of BASIC variants also rarely have show stopping incompatibilities from old to new. VB6 for instance still supported syntax and language features from gwbasic (basica), Quick BASIC, etc., and that span ran close to 30 years. Other Basic variants all seem to follow this pattern as well (with few exceptions, see below).
Pascal, which is a language I tend to like, and its offspring Delphi variants (which I like even more) always seem to me to be languages I can pick up in a matter of days no matter where I left off in using it. Free Pascal almost exactly tallies to my memories of the original.
As for Python specifically, only the migration to 3.x really broke anything, and at that a great deal was backported to 2.6-7, as outlined in this article -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia wrote:
Python logo, 1990s–2005
Main article: Python (programming language)
The programming language Python was conceived in the late 1980s,[1] and its implementation was started in December 1989[2] by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands <sic...>
Python 2.0 was released on October 16, 2000, with many major new features, including a cycle-detecting garbage collector (in addition to reference counting) for memory management and support for Unicode. However, the most important change was to the development process itself, with a shift to a more transparent and community-backed process.[7]
Python 3.0, a major, backwards-incompatible release, was released on December 3, 2008[8] after a long period of testing. Many of its major features have also been backported to the backwards-compatible Python 2.6 and 2.7.[9]
So, we have a language that came around in '89, remained unchanged more or less for a decade, moved to a community backed process of development (which I take it to mean that any changes were hardly 'cavalier' as you put it), and finally (almost another decade later), had a significant rewrite after a long period of testing.
We have been spoiled. In all the years I've used LiveCode I can count the number of deprecated and significantly changed tokens my hands.
Like those mentioned above, Lc tends to change about as much in certain areas. Sound, video, db work, etc. [**]
RB/Xojo would be an exception in my book, as it seems like it changed pretty radically in language from revision to revision. Like going from 3 to 5 that wasn't so bad, 2006 to 2012 changed a lot, to what it is now which I can't stand to even open anymore.
Just my .00000000002 cents
_____
[*] I could be completely off in that statement, since the 80s was about the last time I did anything in C, and it was true up to the point I stopped using C++, which I treated (more or less) as C on steroids.
[**] I am only taking the period when RunRev/Lc actually took over, although this could I think be extended back as far as Mc. I really wish I had bookmarked what some of the people I consider in a class of their own in this language were saying about all this back then, as it was fascinating and quite humorous reading for me
Edited - just adding that I've never actually used Python. I kept meaning to take a look at it, but you can only cover so much in the time you have available.
