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I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

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Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#111

Post by davorg »

n9 wrote: post #4

The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived. I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database,…

> The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl

What does that mean? Perl's basic OO support (using blessed hash references) was introduced with Perl 5 in 1994. I have no idea how anyone would even attempt writing OO code in Perl 4.

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#112

Post by stavros »

worthless-trash wrote: post #58
dehrmann wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java's maintained almost perfect backward compatibility. If you want code you wrote today to run in 10 more years, Java is probably the best choice. Most other languages have too much of a history of breaking changes, or if you pick C/C++, you'll have issues linking against an old UI library.

There are many other languages with a better lindy effect rating ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect ), common lisp, erlang, fortran and more. I won't doubt how java doing well, but other languages have it beat.

The Lindy effect assumes you have no other information about the thing you're estimating. Obviously if I know the thing is on its deathbed, I can't invoke the Lindy effect. Similarly, a hundred-year-old language one person uses any more isn't likely to last another hundred years.

Given the relative sizes, I wouldn't bet on Common Lisp outlasting Java just because it's older.

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#113

Post by stuffoverflow »

eggdaft wrote: post #57
aabhay wrote: post #6

The wayback machine is pure nostalgia. Every time I go there I’m truly amazed at what it’s like to have a society wide memory that automatically captures these different moments of our lives. Old pictures I never thought I’d ever see again. Landing pages for old companies I’ve built and only a handful of my closest friends remember. Blog posts from long deleted places, times, and mental caverns. Just incredible.

Well you got me excited to check out my first homepage but I guess I predate the WM. When did it start archiving?

Internet archive started making their own crawls in late 1996. I believe the oldest captures in the wayback machine are from data donated by alexa starting from January 1996 [1]

1: https://archive.org/details/alexacrawls?sort=-downloads&and%...

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#115

Post by bluenose69 »

squigz wrote: post #87
fragmede wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've had a very different experience of the past 13 years if you've experienced no major shifts. Even the past year has had a whole big change with the advent of LLMs, nevermind the rise of the web, VSCode, typescript, rust, and more. In 2011, Java was on version 7. We're on 22 now in 2024. There have been some paradigm shifts in Java during that time. Streams (Java 8), Lambda expressions (Java 9), the var keyword…

The rise of the web? In the past 13 years? Gosh does that make me feel old...

I imagine some of us reading this learned to program before bitnet was a thing. Punched cards. Paper tape. Booting by entering a lot of binary numbers with toggle switches. Good times. Oh, and that ancient Fortran code? It still works and, if you can see patterns in arithmetic-if blocks, it still expresses clever algorithms elegantly.

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#117

Post by linker3000 »

I found some old Turbo Pascal code I wrote in the late 1980s - early 1990s and managed to compile and run it under a DOS emulator a few years back.

The code is a map editor for the Rockford ('Boulderdash') PC game. Unfortunately, the versions of Rockford in the wild, for download and online play, seem to be based on a later game engine and the map format has changed so the editor no longer works.

The code was designed to produce registered and un-registered versions, but I never released it into the wild.

If anyone has a copy of the original Rockford game version I'd love to know about it.

https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#118

Post by cryptos »

koito17 wrote: post #79
xandrius wrote: post #74

Not to be snarky but 2011 is yesterday for programming, no major shift. I'd imagine almost all code written there would be able to run today.

In the Java world, sure. Other programming language ecosystems tend to have tons of churn. For an anecdote, every TypeScript project I find from 2021 or earlier is simply impossible to build nowadays, meanwhile the ClojureScript code I dealt with in a previous job was able to survive 8 years worth of updates to libraries and the core language. I frequently ran into code that was last modified around 2013 because it j…

What you say about Gradle's instability over a long time is so true. Even code snippets from 3 to 5 five years ago seldom work without some (more or less random) adjustments.

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#119

Post by Almondsetat »

davorg wrote: post #111
n9 wrote: post #4

The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived. I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database,…

> The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl What does that mean? Perl's basic OO support (using blessed hash references) was introduced with Perl 5 in 1994. I have no idea how anyone would even attempt writing OO code in Perl 4.

It says perl 4 style OO Perl, not perl 4 OO style Perl

Re: I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

#120

Post by Almondsetat »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #37

My earliest "large" program which I can remember was a drawing program I wrote in GW BASIC. You could draw figures, change brushes, I think it had a crude filling function and a few other things. In my innocence, I backed it up onto 5.25" floppy disks, labelled them neatly and put them in a box. This was in the late 1980s. Fast forward to 2024, I still have the disks but no drive to read them. On the other hand, the…

>Says a lot about "digital archiving"

It doesn't, since you could easily buy a USB floppy disk reader

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