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

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 193 posts

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

#171

Post by swiftcoder »

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.

One would hope so, but in a variety of popular environments that is not the case. Apple is particularly challenging in this regard - keep in mind, PowerPC macs were still actively supported in 2011. Since then we've sunset PowerPC support, sunset 32-bit support, and I imagine we're only a couple of years short of sunsetting Intel support as well

I recently spent upwards of 4 hours trying to get a 2009 python project to run, and the graphical portion is still subtly broken on MacOS...

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

#173

Post by Almondsetat »

shawn_w wrote: post #151
Almondsetat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He said he was using perl 4. And there was no such thing as "perl 4 style OO". I'm thinking he's just misremembering what version of perl he was using. Easy to do after 20+ years.

I can write C style C++ or html 4 style html 5

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

#174

Post by Almondsetat »

Narishma wrote: post #160
Almondsetat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Says a lot about "digital archiving" It doesn't, since you could easily buy a USB floppy disk reader

You don't have to buy anything to read the notebook though.

After 30 years you might need a new pair of glasses

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

#175

Post by jbverschoor »

jbverschoor wrote: post #21
wh33zle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, how much did they pay you to build it?

My salary was about 30k. Best deal ever lol

Per year for those who are confused..

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

#176

Post by geodel »

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…

> For another anecdote, every Golang repository I've found that predates v2 modules is nearly impossible to build, especially if it contains dependencies that link straight to Google Code instead of GitHub

Sorry, but github repo listed above is compiled Java program in jar format. JVM is doing the heavy lifting here. For golang you are talking about building the program. The equivalent of it would running exe or binary format and that definitely would work unless OS/Arch version itself disappeared.

There is ton of churn in Java ecosystem package moving from javax -> jakarta namespace, new date / time/ file libs, build tool, class file format and so on. What could most likely work is standalone jar file running in older and newer JVMs.

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

#177

Post by noufalibrahim »

Almondsetat wrote: post #120
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

I haven't looked recently but I did search a while ago for a 5.25" USB floppy drive but never found any. Several 3.5" though.

Also, I haven't done any specific climate control for the books or the disks. The notebooks are still readable and I can even tell the difference in the parts I wrote with a ball pen and a fountain pen. Many of the disks are damaged with fungal growth on the magnetic medium and I doubt I'd be able to read them even with a drive.

It's quite challenging to read off an old disk. Jason Scott (the famous digital archivist) had a nice talk on recovering the original source code for Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia from ancient disks that mentions some of the challenges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8

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

#178

Post by 62951413 »

ecshafer wrote: post #143
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…

concurrency is on your list why? DL added concurrency to Java long before 2011.

I remember using j.u.c in production back when it was still concurrent.jar. There were surprisingly many jobs in NYC/London circa 2006 if you had Core Java skills.

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

#179

Post by ssl-3 »

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,…

How does it feel to be 44, fellow old person?

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

#180

Post by tmoertel »

The oldest thing I've written that I can still find on the Internet — the original disks are long gone — is a microbe simulator I wrote about 35 years ago. Apparently, at least two people archived a copy:

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11521-microbe-swarm

I suspect that it would run as is on a 68k Macintosh emulator.

Post reply on HN