I don't know if HN can find any counter-examples, of a language that thrived through an incompatible, code-breaking upgrade.
Of course. Swift 3 is one example. Ruby 1.9, as others have pointed out, is another.
PHP is yet another, and perhaps more relevant because it is close to contemperaneous. It had its "Python 3 moment" with the migration to PHP 5. Lots of BC breakages.[0] That transition took about 3-4 years for most.[1] Most users are now on the current major version, 7, and the remainder on 5 are mostly using its latest release (EOL is EOY). No one uses 4.
Swift 3 is compiled. So you can provide the binaries and be ok.
Ruby 1.9 is a great example of why you should not be too nice: they told everybody "you have a fews months, deal with it". The community moved. Python said "poor things, we understand, take those tools and years to do the thing", and the community cried, and did nothing.
PHP literally failed. They canceled V6 and jumped to V7.
The funniest part ?
None of those languages are even close to Python popularity.
Swift is not even used for most Apple codebase. Python supported even Atari.
Ruby and PHP has almost no use case outside of the web. Python is used by OS, on the web, in GIS, by data analysts, for CGI, in AI, for sysadmin, to make GUI, video games...
And Python is much, MUCH older. 1990. 4/5 years older than Ruby/PHP. It has way more technical debt to pay. Swift ? 2014
Yeah the migration was badly handled from some aspects. But honestly, given the challenge and track record of the competition, it's not too shabby.
Ruby 1.9 was working mostly the same as 1.8 while provising 2-3x speed improvment, and new exciting features.
Python 3 breaks even the basic Python 2 hello world, everything was notably slower, and not anything new and exiciting feature-wise apart ubified string support.
Swift is Apple’s baby and has a captive audience. Since Apple cannot even update their example code, I don’t think it proves any points about keeping up with a moving target.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the impression that Ruby is now an expert's language, and much less accessible to beginners than it used to be. And, while it remains useful and used, it's not growing...
When trying to learn it, I encountered incompatible examples and tutorials, complex and changing ways to update it... and then my toy code stopped working. I eventually found the cause of the code-breaking change, fixed it... thought a bit, and decided against ruby. That's just me though.
Of course. Swift 3 is one example. Ruby 1.9, as others have pointed out, is another.
PHP is yet another, and perhaps more relevant because it is close to contemperaneous. It had its "Python 3 moment" with the migration to PHP 5. Lots of BC breakages.[0] That transition took about 3-4 years for most.[1] Most users are now on the current major version, 7, and the remainder on 5 are mostly using its latest release (EOL is EOY). No one uses 4.
[0] https://secure.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110720002753/http://www.gophp5...