Comment by sevensor

Yeah, no discussion of this topic is complete without bringing up schema evolution. There’s a school of thought that holds this is basically impossible and the right thing to do is never ever make a breaking change. Instead, allow new fields to be absent and accept unrecognized fields always. I think this is unsustainable and hard to reason about.

I have not found it difficult to support backwards compatibility with explicit versioning, and the only justification I’ve seen for not doing it is that it’s impossible to coordinate between development teams. Which I think is an indictment of how the company is run more than anything else.