One of the most used 3rd party libraries in the Java world must be
Apache Commons
Lang. Breaking
client code should be avoided at all costs IMO, but they still do
things like removing capitalise(String) 🇬🇧, because they want you to
use capitalize(String) 🇺🇸 . But to what end? As Simen Sinek says:
Start with Why. Why do
you create a library like commons-lang? For your users. To make them
more productive, right?
Now, you're successful, you've got thousands and thousands of users. You've "done it". People listen to you, you have some well deserved fame in the world of geeks. Time passes and you make a new major release and you do what? Remove methods that people depend on because ... what? Because it makes the API documentation prettier? Because your IDE now sorts the methods nicer? Why oh why?
getFullStackTrace(Throwable) is another one. You must use
getStackTrace(Throwable), stupid. Sure. Thanks. And at the end of
the day, what have we gained?
Or how about changing Validate#notNull(object, message) from
throwing IllegalArgumentException to throwing
NullPointerException? That's harmless, right? Throwing a NPE is so
much more "correct", so that justifies breaking a few thousand lines
of user's code, isn't it?
I've come to deeply respect large projects that retain backwards compatibility at almost any cost: Wordpress, GNU coreutils, the Linux kernel and Oracle Java.
