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Software Rot

permacomputing.net

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Re: Software Rot

#11

Post by forgotmypw17 »

eviks wrote: post #7
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #2

This and Lindy Effect factors a lot into my choices for what to use for my projects. My choice for a project I want to be as maintenance-free as possible are special subsets of ASCII/txt, SQLite, Perl, Bash, PHP, HTML, JS, CSS. The subsets I choose are the parts of these languages which have persisted the longest. Using the Lindy Effect for guidance, I've built a stack/framework that works across 20 years of differen…

This dogmatic approach means you lose out on ergonomics by using poorly designed tools like bash and perl, so you incur those costs all the time for little potential benefit far away in the future (after all, that effect is just a broad hypothesis)

Is it still dogmatic if I consider Perl to be well-designed and have already evaluated more popular tools?

Re: Software Rot

#12

Post by jillesvangurp »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #3

JS is hated but if you compile to browser JS that code will run in 2100. If you mainly deal with files / blobs not databases you will have these things in 2100 too. I think a lot of apps can be JS plus Dropbox integration to sync files. Dropbox may rot but make that a plugin (seperate .js file) and offer local read/write too and I think you'd be pretty future proof.

Except of course software rot and javascript code bases go hand in hand.

You seem to assume, browsers have stopped changing and will be more or less the same 75 years from now.

I think you are right that that code might run. But probably in some kind of emulator. In the same way we deal with IBM mainframes right now. Hardware and OS have long since gone the way of the dodo. But you can get stuff running on generic linux machines via emulation.

I think we'll start seeing a lot of AI driven code rot management pretty soon. As all the original software developers die off (they've long been retired); that might be the only way to keep these code bases alive. And it's also a potential path to migrating and modernizing code bases.

Maybe that will salvage a few still relevant but rotten to the core Javascript code bases.

Re: Software Rot

#13

Post by Daub »

As a software user and teacher, I think about software rot a lot. My concern is that it has a tendency to grow by addition rather than replacement. New features are added whilst the fundamental limits of the architecture are left unattended to.

The reason that Blender grew from being an inside joke to a real contender is the painful re-factoring it underwent between 2009 and 2011.

In contrast, I can feel the fact that the code in After Effects is now over 30 years old. Its native tracker is slow and ancient and not viable for anything but the most simple of tasks. Tracking was 'improved' by sub-contracting the task to a sub-licensed version of Mocha via a truly inelegant integration hack.

There is so much to be said for throwing everything away and starting again, like Apple successfully did with OSX (and Steve Job did to his own career when he left Apple to start Next). However, I also remember how Blackberry tried something similar and in the process lost most of their voodoo.

Re: Software Rot

#14

Post by userbinator »

those written for e.g. Linux will likely cease working in a decade or two

Have we already passed the era of DON'T BREAK USERSPACE when Linus would famously loudly berate anyone who did?

I suspect Win32 is still a good target for stability; I have various tiny utilities written decades ago that still work on Win11. With the continued degradation of Microsoft, at least there is WINE.

Re: Software Rot

#16

Post by eviks »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #11
eviks wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dogmatic approach means you lose out on ergonomics by using poorly designed tools like bash and perl, so you incur those costs all the time for little potential benefit far away in the future (after all, that effect is just a broad hypothesis)

Is it still dogmatic if I consider Perl to be well-designed and have already evaluated more popular tools?

If "This and Lindy Effect" do not "factors a lot", but instead the major factor is you believe perl is better designed, then no, dogmatism of vague future risk is replaced with pragmatism of the immediate usefulness

Re: Software Rot

#17

Post by superkuh »

Unless explicitly addressed rot rate is proportional to popularity.

Unpopular targets, platforms, languages, etc don't get changed and provide a much needed refuge. There are some interpreted languages like perl where a program written today could run on a perl from 2001 and a program from 2001 would run on perl today. And I'm not talking about in a container or with some special version. I'm talking about the system perl.

Some popular languages these days can lose forwards compatibility (gain features, etc) within just a few months that every dev will use within a few more months. In these cultures sofware rot is really fast.

Re: Software Rot

#18

Post by icameron »

Nobody has a better ecosystem of “industrial marine grade code rot resistance” than Microsoft. That I can run the same .NET web app code compiled 20 years ago on a new Server 2025 is an easy experience unequaled by others. Or the same 30 year old VBA macros still doing their thing in Excel 365. There’s a company that knows how to do backwards compatibility.

Re: Software Rot

#19

Post by szundi »

icameron wrote: post #18

Nobody has a better ecosystem of “industrial marine grade code rot resistance” than Microsoft. That I can run the same .NET web app code compiled 20 years ago on a new Server 2025 is an easy experience unequaled by others. Or the same 30 year old VBA macros still doing their thing in Excel 365. There’s a company that knows how to do backwards compatibility.

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Re: Software Rot

#20

Post by szundi »

userbinator wrote: post #14

those written for e.g. Linux will likely cease working in a decade or two Have we already passed the era of DON'T BREAK USERSPACE when Linus would famously loudly berate anyone who did? I suspect Win32 is still a good target for stability; I have various tiny utilities written decades ago that still work on Win11. With the continued degradation of Microsoft, at least there is WINE.

[dead]
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