14 July 2017

Deprecation

I learned this word in 1996 when Java introduced the @deprecation annotation. I looked it up. 'Pray for the removal of evil'. I think deprecation is a great way to communicate that something is no longer good enough. Though I continue to see this one issue. We deprecate things, but they never truly go away.

In my current work we have been working diligently to consolidate a number of common objects and tools into various shared repositories in order to reduce duplication and maintenance. Thats typically a good thing. 

Over the past couple of days however I've discovered a flaw in our plan. We have enough things happening that we can't get all changes applied everywhere, its just not reasonable. So as we improve things and move things around we need a way to communicate that something has been improved. I have not found an official @deprecated tag in Python or Ruby although there are a number of packages available for creating such a tag.

Our mistake has been not using anything to indicate what has been deprecated. We're going to have to change that.

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