However, after a certain point, even the behavior of “Hello World” becomes unpredictable. For example, “Hello World” in Python 2.0 the year 2000:

print "Hello, World!"

But if you tried to run that in Python 3, it would be a syntax error. In Python 3 it’s:

print("Hello, World!")

You couldn’t have predicted that in the year 2000, and there isn’t even anything you could have done about it if you did predict it. With things like this, your only hope is keeping your system simple enough that you can update it easily to use the new syntax. Not “flexible,” not “generic,” but simply simple to understand and modify.

"Keep the system simple enough" is so easy to say and so hard to do!

Ultimately we just have to commit to continual refactoring as we go.