To release 1.0 or not.

[Michael Muller]

Hey all, hope everyone is well :-)

I've been prepared to release version 1.0 of Crack for a while now. I had
planned to release it at some point this month, but then I had some
discussions with a team-mate of mine (Justine Tunney) on the subject of
publicizing the language and now I'm not sure I want to release 1.0 yet.

Justine is a fairly active blogger who gave me some good suggestions on how to
raise interest in the language. Among other things, she suggested not
releasing a 1.0 release because doing so would prematurely limit our ability
to make compatibility-breaking changes to the language and libraries.

As most of you probably know, Crack is following semantic versioning. Once we
release 1.0, we can't make any changes that could break compatibility for
users of the language until the next major version change.

Justine pointed out that since we don't have a very large community to begin
with and since no one is really asking us to release 1.0, there is no real
external pressure to do so.

I think Justine's point is valid, and I've been considering the matter for
some time now. There are a lot of improvements I could make in the libraries
if I'm not limited by compatibility concerns. But on the other hand:

- A stable interface is likely to be a selling factor for the language. I
personally wouldn't want to use a language that wasn't likely to maintain
backwards compatibility across minor releases.
- A stable interface is also helpful to me personally as I'm doing more and
more work in Crack that I don't want to have to revisit.
- There's some amount of PR value in a 1.0 release.
- I've been saying that a 1.0 release is "coming soon" for the past few years.
- I think there's a certain emotional victory for us all in releasing 1.0.

So I'm wondering what you guys think. Should I release 1.0 and lock into our
existing interfaces? Or should I release 0.12 and update the documentation
to state that Crack is going to evolve until the point where there's a good
case to be made for freezing compatibility?

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michaelMuller = mmu...@enduden.com | http://www.mindhog.net/~mmuller
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