Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software Rot

permacomputing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 252 posts

Re: Software Rot

#2

Post by forgotmypw17 »

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 different versions of these languages, which increases the chances of it continuing to work without breaking changes for another 20 years.

Re: Software Rot

#3

Post by bravesoul2 »

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.

Re: Software Rot

#5

Post by akkartik »

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…

For similar considerations + considerations of code size and hackability, I lately almost always prefer the Lua eco-system: https://akkartik.name/freewheeling

Re: Software Rot

#6

Post by tekno45 »

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.

postgres will be around in 2500 lol

Re: Software Rot

#7

Post by eviks »

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)

Re: Software Rot

#8

Post by fuzzfactor »

There were companies not quite worth a $billion who would have never made it that far if they couldn't convince masses of people that platform rot was good for them.

Re: Software Rot

#9

Post by argomo »

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)

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/.
Post reply on HN