I am also a heavy user of Poetry and I am in dread of updating it. Everytime an update happens, something breaks. Do other people have the same experience? Is this a Python only thing?
I think there are two things going on:
1. Python: Python's laxness doesn't make it easy to define strict APIs or know when you're breaking them. The lack of export controls also means defining what's in the API and what's not is hard. Also Python's strong introspection makes it possible to do crazy things further blurring the API boundary.
2. The ecosystem: with pydantic as an example - the library has grown enormously, more than I ever imagined from an experiment in a file in another project to a major library used by thousands of millions of developers, for a very wise range of applications. I never imagined that happening, do I didn't think all that hard about the interface at the beginning, or even at the v1 release. I also knew much less back then.
I'm not sure this kind of growth is very common in other languages except JavaScript.
(Written on my phone, sorry for typos)
Java developers, for example, tend to be slightly older, and therefore have had more painful experiences upgrading stuff, but they also tend to work in large enterprises where breaking stuff has an associated cost, that you do not experience when you are hacking on your own. Not breaking stuff requires an insane amount of energy and discipline.
For the technological argument, I like to think back to the 1990s, when I experimented with Common Lisp, and was amazed at how long one could work on one piece of software, without having to restart any of it. Oftentimes, the runtime state and the source code on disk would get terribly out of sync. It was even a best practice to simply store the memory image to disk, and restart from that later. I envisioned a future in which these problems would be solved, and instead of writing new programs, we would merely polish and improve running software, keeping the data alive for eternity.
Unfortunately, it's now 30 years later, and the only movement in that direction I see is that data remains somewhat active while being shared by multiple services. Unfortunately, the services themselves are still blobs that must be restarted over and over again, losing all intermediate state.
I think we could do better, for example by having a programming language that takes immutability to the next level, i.e. by not allowing a restart, or by requiring upgrade functions to go from old data formats to newer ones. Perhaps something may have come out of the field of reversible programming languages?