Language change and code breaks (fwd)

[Nick Efford]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 20:09:05 -0400,
Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:

> I--one of those professional programmers--write a Python script for
> someone who runs a business, or a non-profit, or an agency, to run on
> their CGI webserver.  This client knows not the first thing about Python
> or about programming, nor do they maintain the webserver, just rent
> space on it.  But still, this script does something useful for users of
> the website--order products, or request documents, or send data to a
> database.
> 
> I go away, no longer available.  The client's web hosting company
> upgrades the Python installation to Python 3.7 (this is in the future
> :-)).  Client's scripts break.

Interesting scenario.

Of course, this could happen with other s/w, too.  This really
says more about the policy of the web hosting company w.r.t.
upgrades than it does about the wisdom or otherwise of breaking
compatibility in a future version of Python.

Any web hoster worth its salt should at least run old and new
versions of the s/w in parallel and provide clients with the
opportunity to test programs in the new environment before
migrating.


Nick