The pain before the payoff

Invariably, breaking programming interfaces creates a lot of pain, and the habitual willingness to change Drupal's programming interfaces is routinely identified as one of the main issues with Drupal.

For example, rewriting Drupal's form handling from Drupal 4.6 to Drupal 4.7 broke hundreds of contributed modules. When it turned out that updating those modules was a much bigger effort than anticipated, all hell broke loose. It led to quality problems and significant release delays, and it unleashed hordes of frustrated users.

Today, two months after the Drupal 4.7.0 release, Drupal developers around the world are slowly recovering from the pain. We're not quite there yet, but more and more people say that the payoff is huge and that they are thoroughly enjoying the new possibilities.

So let's capture that thought for future reference. Sweeping changes are required to make major advances in technology, and often there is a lot of pain before the payoff.