My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#2Which is better/worse, the hack with a plan which is removed promptly or the barnacle that persists forever?
The barnacle did provide more lifetime business value after all.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#3There is plenty of code I've written that's still out there doing useful things.
I'm sure some not insignificant parts of Windows, Linux, tools, libraries, browsers etc. etc. are fairly old code that just keeps working .. perhaps with fixes and improvements.
Good code lasts a long time. Technical debt is something you are continuously paying "interest" on. Just like any debt, sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#4As long as you know how to get out of technical debt (islands too) when you see one, you're suited for any task.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#5The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so.
First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free.
Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping me prove it is data-race-free and memory safe.
Each time I rewrite this stuff, someone hands me 6-7 figures. This is awesome.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#6The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so. First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free. Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping…
> so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so.
Citation needed. Seems that it just us getting more and more abstracted which can make it easier but not necessarily easier.
The hardest part for the next gen of developers is not having Moore's law to save them from crappy coding.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#7There is plenty of code I've written that's still out there doing useful things. I'm sure some not insignificant parts of Windows, Linux, tools, libraries, browsers etc. etc. are fairly old code that just keeps working .. perhaps with fixes and improvements. Good code lasts a long time. Technical debt is something you are continuously paying "interest" on. Just like any debt, sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes…
> perhaps with fixes and improvements.
in my experience, if there's no will or budget for a rewrite, it gets virtualized, locked away behind a firewall/corporate network with a restricted set of users, and will basically run forever as long as the ISA and virtual storage is supported by emulation and the business process still exists and is able to support the infra/people involved.
think of it like a zero coupon 100 year bond in technical debt issuance underwritten by the central bank (corporate hq). and highly liquid in the sense that a virtual image is easy to move around.
the good part is it just gets faster and takes up less % resources as hardware improves, and forever-bugs are usually worked around and documented by the people pushing the buttons.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#8Interesting how C programming has survived that entire time period in the operating system and embedded worlds, although the spread of multicore hardware running lots of threads in parallel has also led to many changes (but even those changes were beginning to be implemented 20 years ago).
20 years from now, C will probably still be a core language in its niche.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#9Brian Kenighan wistfully removed the lex/yacc parser in the OneTrueAwk many years ago, and replaced it with a custom parser (I believe for performance reasons). The OneTrueAwk remains the standard awk in BSD, renewed, but not replaced. I don't think it's going anywhere.
The POSIX standards, flawed as they may be, have incredible staying power. These standards run our phones and embedded, supercomputers, current Apple workstations, game consoles, and are significant in many other places.
Microsoft itself implemented POSIX in Windows from the beginning (likely recognizing it's importance as the former vendor of Xenix), and while this has waxed and waned, running the "wsl.exe -l -o" command on modern Windows will catalog Ubuntu, Kali, and Oracle Linux that are not Linux, but serviced by the Windows kernel's POSIX layer under WSL1.
Applications that implement or greatly enhance POSIX have staying power.
Those who seek code longevity would do well to study it.
Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated
#10Interesting how C programming has survived that entire time period in the operating system and embedded worlds, although the spread of multicore hardware running lots of threads in parallel has also led to many changes (but even those changes were beginning to be implemented 20 years ago). 20 years from now, C will probably still be a core language in its niche.
Is it interesting? Somewhere along the chain someone needs to know assembly. Either hand crafting it or some compiler exists for some language that is one step removed. At this level my feeling is that there is less desire to constantly change tools.