lovely article aside from this bit:
> while those written for e.g. Linux will likely cease working in a decade or two
there's nothing to support this claim in practice. linux is incredibly stable
Software Rot
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Re: Software Rot
#32those 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.
You can account for that by using Go, with CGO_ENABLED=0. Then you have a self contained binary that relies solely on the POSIX syscalls.
Re: Software Rot
#33Earlier 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…
Python is a very bad example because of the incompatibility between Python 2 and Python 3. All my pre-2012 Python code is now legacy because of this, and since most of it is not worth updating I will only be able to run it as long as there are Python 2 interpreters around.
I like Python as a language, but I would not use it for something that I want to be around 20+ years from now, unless I am ok doing the necessary maintenance work.
Re: Software Rot
#34those 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 am considering learning Win32 for that purpose, not that I plan to do anything complicated with it, but for small single purpose tools it should be useful, at least when some kind of UI is needed.
Re: Software Rot
#35lovely article aside from this bit: > while those written for e.g. Linux will likely cease working in a decade or two there's nothing to support this claim in practice. linux is incredibly stable
I also noticed this part of the article but for the oposite reason (I think 10-20 years is overly optimistic). I've written a small 2d game for Linux back in 00s. Using C++, SDL and a few other libraries (for example now-abandoned libparagui for GUI).
Any time I tried to run it afterwards - I had to recompile it, and a few times I had to basically port it (because libparagui got abandoned and some stuff in libc changed so I couldn't just compile the old libparagui version with the new libc).
It's surprisingly hard to make linux binaries that will work even 5 years from now, never mind 10-20 years from now.
For comparison I still have games I've written for DOS and windows in 90s and the binaries still work (OK - I had to apply a patch for Turbo Pascal 7 200 MHz bug).
The assumptions around linux software is that it will be maintained by infinite number of free programmers so you can change anything and people will sort it out.
Re: Software Rot
#36Re: Software Rot
#37Python 2 situation opened my eyes to this. To this day I see a lot of py2 stuff floating around, especially around work environments. So much so, in fact, that I had to make scripts that automatically pull the sources of 2.7.18 and build them in the minimal configuration to run stuff.
Re: Software Rot
#38Re: Software Rot
#39Nobody 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.
As somebody who works on IBM mainframes, I disagree. IBM is probably the best at forward application compatibility.
People will laugh, but they should really look.
Re: Software Rot
#40JS 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.
Things like E4X, sharp variables, and array comprehensions have already been removed; it's just that the mass of newer developers mean the average doesn't know about them. Unfortunately it's not like they never remove things.