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

While I have only worked in engineering industry for a few years, I have never seen any large scale, or for that matter any scale, use of octave. Are there example of companies replacing matlab with octave? I don't see that happening because of 2 reasons:

1. Octave does not have the inclination or man power to replicate all famous toolboxes of matlab. They are not even going for 100% compatibility, their home page says _many_ matlab scripts can be dropped in. A company with technology lock in will have such a large code base that I don't think octave will be able to handle it.

2. I don't think managers want to give away the ability to pick up a phone and shout at someone when something doesn't work. Even in my short career I have had this happen. Companies I worked for payed in hundreds of thousands USD per year in mathworks "support". Now, most of these support credits never get used, but at least the older managers like to have the option.

I work with a 20 years in development code base, maybe I should try and run some of it in octave one day.

Another thing about point 2, I think Julia did the right thing by establishing a company to promote the language. I see that tech managers are more open to it because of that. Can this be called the red hat effect?

lol, good one :D

When the Sun has turned into a red giant and all life on earth is reduced to microbes... Cobol will remain. :)

C

I would say some form of spreadsheet software will be with us for awhile.