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Software Rot

permacomputing.net

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Re: Software Rot

#21

Post by eviks »

argomo wrote: post #9
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)

It has to be weighed against all the time spent learning, evaluating, and struggling with new tools. Personally, I've probably wasted a lot of time learning /new/ that I should have spent learning /well/.

Right, nothing is free, but switching costs is a different argument.

Re: Software Rot

#22

Post by wolvesechoes »

superkuh wrote: post #17

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…

> Unpopular targets, platforms, languages, etc don't get changed

Ah yes, Windows, some niche OS for hipsters and base-dwellers.

Re: Software Rot

#23

Post by wolvesechoes »

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.

I would love ReactOS to succeed.

Re: Software Rot

#24

Post by zeta0134 »

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)

Very helpfully, python has stuck around for just as long and is almost always a better choice against these two specific tools for anything complicated. It's not perfect, but I'm much more likely to open a random python script I wrote 6 years ago and at least recognize what the basic syntax is supposed to be doing. Bash beyond a certain complexity threshold is... hard to parse.

Python's standard library is just fine for most tasks, I think. It's got loads of battle tested parsers for common formats. I use it for asset conversion pipelines in my game engines, and it has so far remained portable between windows, linux and mac systems with no maintenance on my part. The only unusual crate I depend on is Pillow, which is also decently well maintained.

It becomes significantly less ideal the more pip packages you add to your requirements.txt, but I think that applies to almost anything really. Dependencies suffer their own software rot and thus vastly increase the "attack surface" for this sort of thing.

Re: Software Rot

#26

Post by mmackh »

b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #15

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Not if software is tied to infrastructure, buildings, etc.

Re: Software Rot

#28

Post by forgotmypw17 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #24
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)

Very helpfully, python has stuck around for just as long and is almost always a better choice against these two specific tools for anything complicated. It's not perfect, but I'm much more likely to open a random python script I wrote 6 years ago and at least recognize what the basic syntax is supposed to be doing. Bash beyond a certain complexity threshold is... hard to parse. Python's standard library is just fine…

My main problem with python is that a script I wrote 6 years ago (or even 1 year ago) is not likely to run without requiring modifications.

If it's me running it, that's fine. But if it's someone else that's trying to use installed software, that's not OK.

Re: Software Rot

#29

Post by jwrallie »

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?

At the point being discussed, which is not breaking backward compatibility, it indeed is arguably better than more popular tools, and I believe perl has other advantages too.

Re: Software Rot

#30

Post by atq2119 »

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.

No, the issue in Linux is that userspace has traditionally had a tendency to break itself.
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