Re: More Problems with Rigid Languages

Spotted in Planet Python

Too bad the language is not simple enough to accomodate change, especially backward compatible change. Agile languages win again.

I find it amusing to read this on a Python blog just after the recent Python 2.4 update in Red Hat's RAWHIDE repository broke pretty much ALL of Fedora. The most prominent breakage being in URLLIB which changed an HTTP response "code" field to "status" ( or was it the other way around? ). Being dynamic, none of the dependent packages fail to build, they just fail to run.

So this is one place where dynamic languages can fall down, of course - one could argue that if there were failing unit tests blocking the building of the RPMS this wouldn't matter, or that RAWHIDE is bleeding edge and one should expect it to break, either way it annoyed me. Thankfully I had just finished downloading the ISO files for Fedora Core 3 final and promptly formatted and reinstalled away from the 'hide.

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