Comment by matheusmoreira

> I guess nobody wants to spend time on backward compatibility as a hobby.

Getting paid to maintain something certainly goes a long way. Without payment, I suppose it comes down to how much one cares about the platform being built. I deliberately chose to target the Linux kernel directly via system calls because of their proven commitment to ABI stability.

On the other hand, I made my own programming language and I really want to make it as "perfect" as possible, to get it just right... So I put a notice in the README that explains it's in early stages of development and unstable, just in case someone's crazy enough to use it. I have no doubt the people who work on languages like Ruby and Python feel the same way... The languages are probably like a baby to them, they want people to like it, they want it to succeed, they just generally care a lot about it. And that's why mistakes like print being a keyword just have to be fixed.