>>1410>>1797There's a marked difference between technical software and "mass" software in that respect. Most technical software is tightly coded, not necessarily without spaghetti code but generally lightweight for what it is, and they tend to have very high backwards compatibility. If they don't have backward compatibility then either it's a totally new sort of software for a totally new sort of data or it's a piece of shit 'ware.
Hell you can kind of even see it for Windows, the most "mass" software there is, because Windows has a sizeable technical userbase that needs it to keep supporting a piece of software written in the 80s by a company that's gone bankrupt in the 90s for hardware that hasn't even shown up in landfills since 2000, that's why you still can't name a file PRN, because writing a string in command line to the PRN file is a fucking ancient way to get a printer to print something that no printer has actually used for decades but somewhere there is a research team whose analysis software needs the ability to print something by writing to the PRN file and Microsoft knows that.
Mac, on the other hand, has basically a nonexistent technical userbase (and I mean like actually technical, not idiot art/music majors who think they're the next Chopin or Picasso) so they get away with dropping backwards compatibility for something only a few years old every update.
