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It's a matter of perspective, I guess...

When you look from the program's perspective, the context changes and becomes unrecognizable, IOW, it rots.

When you look from the context's perspective, the program changes by not evolving and keeping up with the context, IOW, it rots.

Maybe we anthropomorphize both and say "they grow apart". :)




We say the context has breaking changes.

We say the context is not backwards compatible.


Can you see how this comes off as a pedantic difference? If I ran a program 10 years ago and it worked, then run it today and it doesn't work, we say the program is broken and needs to be updated. We don't say the world around it is broken and needs to revert back to its original state.


We do revert back to a previous context if that seems practical: revert back to a previous compiler or library version.




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