# Did Julia community do something to improve its correctness?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/did-julia-community-do-something-to-improve-its-correctness/102515>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Created:** [August 5, 2023, 7:16am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/did-julia-community-do-something-to-improve-its-correctness/102515 "2023-08-05T07:16:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 261

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**Author:** ![ParadaCarleton](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/paradacarleton/32/20005_2.png) [@ParadaCarleton](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ParadaCarleton)\
**Post date:** [November 2, 2023, 9:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/did-julia-community-do-something-to-improve-its-correctness/102515/261 "2023-11-02T21:10:44Z")

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> [@adienes](#):
>
> I have seen it happen quite a few times that some pr pops in the tracker that fixes a bug (or something that is at least _arguably_ a bug) and either stalls or is outright rejected because it leads to a 10% performance regression in such and such use case, or is pedantically minorly breaking semver, or would require runtime checks inside the implementation rather than relying only on method signature

IIRC Steve McConnell calls this “cargo cult software engineering”–things like:

1. Thoroughly reviewing or nitpicking new PRs rather than addressing bigger issues in existing code (forgetting the purpose of code review is to fix bugs)
2. Obsession with keeping packages “lightweight” by refusing to take on even widely-used, quick-to-compile dependencies (forgetting the purpose of lightweight packages is to reduce compile time and fragility)
3. Religious adherence to written contracts of compatibility/API (forgetting the purpose of avoiding breaking changes is to reduce maintenance burden)

Even much more well-established languages are more willing to make big changes than Julia is, despite having much larger codebases to maintain. For example:

- Python breaks some code every minor update; they just give 3 years’ warning, more than enough time for even poorly maintained packages to fix issues.
- Dart literally switched from dynamic to static typing and abolished null pointers (two massive changes) in the 1-\>2 shift. A few months ago, they removed `f(name: arg)` for named keyword arguments.

Meanwhile, I think [this](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-julia-is-not-at-that-stage-of-development-anymore/44872) is the most common reply to almost any request to fix a problem. And changes that don’t break the Official Contract provided by docs (most notably, offset indices) are treated as being non-breaking, without any mitigating measures (like scripts or tools to help people convert, `@inbounds` deprecation, or required ordinal indexing).

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