#software culture

[mentalisttraceur-software]

The C community in particular has this weird pattern with how and when people often deprecate any C standard besides the latest.

I mean deprecate in its actual meaning, not in the new software-specific meaning. (The one that means you're saying something is bad/discouraged, not old/unsupported.)

And they deprecate it pretty strongly, as if we're talking about critical fixes to the language without which your code is broken, rather than just new features and nicer guarantees.

Now this may shock some C developers, but the old standards never stop being the thing that tells you what will work on the old systems.

So - again, C devs, make sure you're sitting down for this - if a developer wants to make sure that users with older compilers or systems are able to compile their software, "that standard is obsolete and you shouldn't be using it" is both wrong and so presumptous that it's almost arrogant.

At a minimum, try adjusting your tune to "oh by the way, you know that's not the newest standard, right?" for strangers on the internet, because there is a very good chance they know, and are just trying to be considerate of developer-users who can't upgrade their toolchain because their target hardware or a legacy OS support obligation forces them to use some proprietary compiler that hasn't gotten a substantial upgrade in a decade. Maybe tell them "hey by the way every mainstream production compiler since {date} supports {newer standard}, I wouldn't worry about it, you're not going to hurt anyone by assuming a newer standard."

And even for people new to your team, "for this project we decided to only support the latest standard, so I wouldn't worry about" is far better than both assuming they don't know and probably unintentionally practicing lightcore authoritarianism.

No other language community have I seen people act as if not using the latest language version is somehow harmful. The closest to a good reason I see for that is that C actually tightens up the undefined behavior every new version, so you can rely on more basic assumptions in your code. But I never see that mentioned by the devs who react to mentions of an C older standard this way... no hints of that reason in their wording. It comes off more like social norm policing, "(the Authority said) this is Bad now, stop doing it".

[mentalisttraceur-software]

The unfortunate thing with "deprecate" as a word in software is that...

it was a very useful word before software usage coopted it.

"This is bad", "this has flaws", "this has problems", "this is broken", "this will misbehave", "this is liable to confuse or mislead your intuition into using it wrongly", and so on.

Those are deprecations in the original, general, composable sense. And often, those are good reasons in order to make a new version or alternative, and encourage people to stop using the old one, and start using the new one.

But then software has a very justified need for another meaning, that is more general in another sense, and could also be usefully composable if abstracted from software: "there is a newer version or alternative, and this one will eventually be unsupported or otherwise become 'bad' or less useful in the future" and "this way will be supported and good to use indefinitely, but you are encouraged to use the new way unless you have good reason not to".

A decent amount of modern "deprecation" usage in software is more like that second meaning.

On the one hand, I don't like the muddying of waters that happens when two useful meanings get conflated under one word. And I do think that part of this is because too many people think they can just learn words from context without missing or damaging some important meaning.

But on the other hand, both meanings are useful. It's just that words have their usefulness damaged when they have to carry two or more distinct meanings that can be useful in the same context.

But there's not - as far as I know - another word that really fulfills this second purpose. So of course it was inevitable that the nearest word, the one that got used in a way that most matched the needed meaning shape, got coopted.