Security News > 2022 > July > Why Developers Hate Changing Language Versions

If developers don't adopt the new language version, they're excluded from the new feature set.

That's the conundrum: to adopt the new, more advanced version of a language developers need to refactor, and along the way they'll spend a huge amount of effort - and break all sorts of unexpected things, introducing new bugs into an application that was running just fine.

Otherwise, despite adjusting the code to fit the new language version, you're just where you used to be: a codebase running on a new language version, but with no new features.

If you don't have updated applications, because developers won't refactor old codebases, you can't move your applications to newer operating systems that don't support the old versions of the language - and thus break the application.

Can something similar be done for language versions? A way to effectively "Upgrade" a language runtime with the latest security fixes while at the same time not changing how that specific language version or libraries otherwise work, thereby removing the need to refactor?

Repeating what's been achieved for operating systems and applying it to language versions will give developers enormous breathing room, reducing the need to continuously refactor.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/07/why-developers-hate-changing-language.html