> A frozen language means that either those modifications are harder
I don't agree that it's harder. What is definitely harder is not being able to ship bug-fixes or modifications without ripping everything up because the language has moved on since your last release. And that is very common when developing for, as an example, iOS, since Swift is a fast-moving language that doesn't maintain backwards compatibility. The benefits of having some new language feature in Swift are far outweighed by the downside of existing codebases being invalidated. The various languages in the Javascript family suffer from this as well. The Python 2 -> Python 3 debacle was another example of this.
I have dusted off 20 year old Java code which compiled and ran just fine just fine. That is extraordinarily valuable to me, and requires a lot of discipline by the language maintainers. In fact, the new faster pace of Java iteration could be its downfall, time will tell.
A last note: how many language features from the past 20 years really matter? How many really speed up development, improve maintainability, etc. I would say that there are very few. In fact, perhaps the only one that passes that bar might be async/await type threading advancements.
I don't agree that it's harder. What is definitely harder is not being able to ship bug-fixes or modifications without ripping everything up because the language has moved on since your last release. And that is very common when developing for, as an example, iOS, since Swift is a fast-moving language that doesn't maintain backwards compatibility. The benefits of having some new language feature in Swift are far outweighed by the downside of existing codebases being invalidated. The various languages in the Javascript family suffer from this as well. The Python 2 -> Python 3 debacle was another example of this.
I have dusted off 20 year old Java code which compiled and ran just fine just fine. That is extraordinarily valuable to me, and requires a lot of discipline by the language maintainers. In fact, the new faster pace of Java iteration could be its downfall, time will tell.
A last note: how many language features from the past 20 years really matter? How many really speed up development, improve maintainability, etc. I would say that there are very few. In fact, perhaps the only one that passes that bar might be async/await type threading advancements.