Stability by Design

Summary

I recently came across the following tweet from OneHappyFellow1: I found this tweet interesting because the language I use the most—Clojure—is both dynamic and yet the ecosystem has a very strong reputation for stability. Before diving into why exactly this is the case, allow me to present some evidence to justify this belief. Are Clojure Libraries Stable? I searched the Clojurians Slack for the word "stability," and out of 20 total posts on the first page, 8 are applauding the stability that Clojure brings. This slack is the main forum for Clojurians, and it includes discussions about various libraries, bugs, fixes, etc, therefore one would reasonably expect stability complaints to dominate the discussion. My search is obviously not a random sampling, but it should give you an idea of how much the community appreciates and celebrates stability. As further evidence, consider the following two charts from A History of Clojure which detail the introduction and retention of new code by release for both Clojure and for Scala. Clojure codebase—Introduction and retention of code Scala codebase—Introduction and retention of code While this doesn't necessarily translate to library stability, it's reasonable to assume that the attitude of the Clojure maintainers will seep into the community. And that assumption is true. Let's look at the retention of code for various popular libraries. I selected the following libraries off the top of my head with three criteria: all have more than 500 stars and are in active use. I could have easily selected more. xforms codebase—Introduction and retention of code Component codebase—Introduction and retention of code Instaparse codebase—Introduction and retention of code core.match codebase—Introduction and retention of code Clearly library authors follow in the footsteps of the Clojure maintainers in this regard. The last evidence I will give is anecdotal, but informative. I recently pushed an update to my fault tolerance library, Fusebox....