I don’t think developers of a language are responsible for external tutorials and example code (except that provided in the documentation). It’s on the authors of those tutorials to specify the version used during the tutorial.
I agree - this would probably solve most questions of “why doesn’t this example from place y work anymore”, but as far as I can tell those are not the majority of questions about this (at least here on Discourse). As far as I can tell, the number of people updating older code and asking about why it doesn’t work anymore far outweigh those just newly learning julia (there might a be a large hidden figure here though). Those would certainly also be served well with a more direct message of “hey, use 0.7” on the download page. Maybe even something like
Updating code from before Julia 1.0? Use Julia 0.7 for deprecation warnings!
directly below the “Download Julia 1.0” button would be a nice addition.
Well, asymptotically they have worked for a fraction of the language age that will converge to 0
I have a somewhat pragmatic approach: given that developer time is scarce, I would rather see it focused on things other than keeping an implicit history of the language in Base just to be able to guide users about an upgrade path after the deprecation period has expired. Especially since we have amazing tools to update code.
Of course, if someone wants to maintain a parallel version of Julia with nice deprecation messages going back to ancient versions, they are welcome to do so (it is conceptually trivial, just a lot of tedious work). This could of course live in a package. Ultimately all of the discussions about what the language should do in these cases boils down to someone putting in the work.
