Breaking and Mending Compatibility

We often think that backward compatibility is hard, but actually it’s rather easy. Any project with users has a built-in mechanism for maintaining backward compatibility — people complain when it’s broken. That’s how you know. And, most of the time they let you know quickly.

The problem with this is that users can force unwanted backward compatibility on you.

Hyrum’s Law states:

With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract,
all observable...