Modern Software Recapitulates Greek Mythology
The Titan Kronos (Saturn) ate his children.
Modern software developers are doing the same.
Kronos was afraid being overthrown by his sons. So he eliminated them.
Many modern software developers seem hell bent on devouring the past. But they have less reason to do so than did Kronos.
Few of us remember mainframe computers (although they still exist). During their heyday from the 1950s through the 1990s the unbreakable rule was “backwards compatibility”. It was a great sin to change an API (Application Programming Interface) to an operating system or library in a way that could cause existing software to go awry or fail.
This honoring of the past worked: There are many mainframe financial applications, written (often in the 1959 language Cobol) between 1960 and 1990 that are still in heavy use today.
However, today the concept of backward compatibility is no longer universally respected. Today many software developers and providers do not bother to pause and think of the consequences before racing forward and breaking with the past.
We are forcing people to fix what is not broken. We are forcing people to rewrite working code or abandon working products simply because someone, somewhere has decided to cancel existing, working software foundations, often for no reason more substantial than that those foundations are older and perhaps less “elegant” in the eyes of some.