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Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?

#13

Post by gnulinux »

m1kal wrote: post #11

TeX, BLAS, Vim and Emacs

BLAS API will probably last forever but the actual implementation library people use today may not. I suspect the same may be true for vim in the very long run, maybe someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular (like vi vs vim). I find it unlikely that that'll happen to Emacs since it's extremely complex, maybe we'll just move on before that happens.

Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?

#17

Post by acidburnNSA »

newswasboring wrote: post #10

I'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not their core competence.

I'm in engineering and get the sense that python is going to make MATLAB nearly irrelevant, save maybe for some fancy GUI stuff like simulink. Of course numpy ode solvers can do the same thing as simulink but not as easily.

Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?

#18

Post by routerl »

gnulinux wrote: post #13
m1kal wrote: post #11

TeX, BLAS, Vim and Emacs

BLAS API will probably last forever but the actual implementation library people use today may not. I suspect the same may be true for vim in the very long run, maybe someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular (like vi vs vim). I find it unlikely that that'll happen to Emacs since it's extremely complex, maybe we'll just move on before that happens.

> someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular (like vi vs vim).

https://neovim.io/

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