[Distutils] Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts

[Nick Coghlan]

On 31 October 2015 at 14:15, Wayne Werner <waynejwerner at gmail.com> wrote:
> First, do no harm, eh?

I haven't had time to watch it yet so I don't have the full context of
the observation, but that's only true if current users are considered
categorically more important than future users. That's a dangerous
line of thinking, as it means the cognitive burden of learning a
language and ecosystem can only ever grow, and never shrink (since
superseded concepts are never pruned from the set of things you need
to learn, and you're also never really able to fix design mistakes
resulting from limited perspectives in early iterations).

Large scale migration projects like the shift away from implementation
defined behaviour in the Python packaging ecosystem are cases where
reducing barriers to entry for *new* users has edged out compatibility
for existing users as a priority - the latter is still important, it's
just acceptable for the level of compatibility to be less than 100%.

Regards,
Nick.

P.S. From a medical perspective, there are certainly cases were
doctors *do* inflict a lesser harm (e.g. amputations) to avoid a
greater harm (e.g. death). "We saved the limb, but lost the patient"
isn't one of the available options.