Judaic approaches to API deprecation

Orthodox: the API was set down in the specification generations ago. Even if it’s wildly out of date and doesn’t make sense anymore, we’re still going to support it. There can be no new APIs; if you want new features, figure out a way to get them through the most convoluted combinations of the old APIs

See: Websites supporting IE6

Reform: We broke your APIs. They weren’t good anymore. Here’s some new APIs. Some APIs have the same name, but work completely differently; just deal with it, it’s better now. Basically that other competing religion, but it does make way more sense.

See: AngularJS

Atheist: I’m pretty sure no one was using these APIs, or relying on the guarantees we were making about them, so I’m just not supporting them. It was a whole song and dance to get them to work, and I’m pretty sure it had literally no effect. Not supporting these APIs relieves significant burden I was putting up with until now because my elders were telling me it was “the right way”.

See: JS/HTML/CSS → JSX; “REST” APIs → GraphQL. Wait all of these are Facebook… and you’re telling me Zuck’s “Buddhist” now?

Conservative: I refuse to change these APIs, because they’re defined in the spec. I don’t care about how old the spec is, or why it is that way; they are what they are, and I’m going to deal with it. Oh those other APIs? Yeah no I’m just not supporting those. Refuse to change anything, but drop support for the ones you don’t like.

See: Pagedraw? This is definitely both my approach to APIs, and my religious affiliation…

Chasidism: We’ve decided that we’re only using C (‘89), and all software we write must be compatible with a PDP11. We live in 2018 and none of us are running PDP11s, but just in case, all software should be compliant with it anyway.

See: Richard Stallman

Reconstructionist: Progressive, but no one’s really sure what it does differently, or why we need it.

Example: people picking Vue.js over React