I’m sure they thought long and hard before talking about the Julia roadmap at JuliaCon. It seemed like a clear and conscious decision. I wasn’t for it at first, but I have come around to think that it makes a lot of sense: how are we supposed to build that ecosystem people want if there’s still no guarantee of language stability? The debugger is precisely an issue BECAUSE of pre-1.0 instability, putting it all on one guy to constantly update a complex package every time Base Julia changes and then wondering why he doesn’t have the time to fix it with every little internal change. These kinds of things need 1.0 in order to work well, almost by definition.
1.0 will only be a PR disaster if we, the Julia community, talk about 1.0 as some holy grail that fixes everything. We were told what 1.0 means, and so we should start correcting our own use of the term. The release should just clearly say “this is a breaking change, which for now breaks the debugger and … and …, but it’s the last breaking change for awhile: now let’s go fix things”.
Though it would be interesting to have a v0.7 “stable update phase”, with a long (3-6 months?) “let’s get together and update the ecosystem and get rid of everything which isn’t working” time. Essentially: “Julia 1.0 is already complete. It is exactly v0.7 but without the depwarns. However, given the significance of this number, we are giving the ecosystem an extended time to catch up with the changes, and cleaning up the packages which do not”. That’s something I could get around.
But this is just my second-hand retelling + reinterpretation of what we learned from the Julia roadmap talk from JuliaCon. Maybe @StefanKarpinski has time to clear things up.