Every so often I wind up reading something that makes me see red.Today's is this piece (seen via Hacker News). So I want to write an open message:

Dear open source people, it is really simple. If someone has a workingsystem at time X, upgrades to your new software, and their system stopsworking, they do not care if their system might work at some undefinedpoint in the future. You broke their system now , and this is whatthey care about. You

Recently I saw a stackoverflow question on why scriptinglanguages aren't suitable as Unix shell scripting languages . My answer is that shellsare strongly optimized for a different use case than programminglanguages, and this has significant effects on the design of thelanguages that they use and their semantics.Above all, shells are optimized for invoking external programs; asuccessful shell has ruthlessly pruned away everything that makesthis awkward. Scripting languages, like other languages, are insteadgenerally optimized for writing expressions, statements, and otherinternal language