75% of code in Common Lisp.
Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#22leftPad
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#23I'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not their core competence.
I don't think it will last that long. There are a multitude of countries who are yet to make significant contributions to software, they're going to write and rewrite tons of stuff, and countries who want some measure of independence fostering competitors like Yandex to Google. It's hard to imagine rising economies within Africa, Asia and Latin America will ignore the cost of proprietary/leased software they can write themselves. It didn't even take one century for competitors to emerge for Windows, MSSQL, Oracle, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#24I'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not their core competence.
I'm in engineering and get the sense that python is going to make MATLAB nearly irrelevant, save maybe for some fancy GUI stuff like simulink. Of course numpy ode solvers can do the same thing as simulink but not as easily.
What kind of engineering are you doing? Do the companies you work for think of software dev as one of their core competence? I work in semi conductor manufacturing and currently employed with one of the largest equipment manufacturers. The technology lock in is fairly strong in this and other companies in this field because of 2 reasons
1. Legacy code is very valuable. Mistakes are costly and thus nobody wants to change anything once its proven to work.
2. They hire people who are already proficient in matlab. In all job postings it is written explicitly as a requirement. There have been and will be initiatives to move over to other languages but they always die out because the cost is monumentally high
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#25I'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not their core competence.
I don't think it will last that long. There are a multitude of countries who are yet to make significant contributions to software, they're going to write and rewrite tons of stuff, and countries who want some measure of independence fostering competitors like Yandex to Google. It's hard to imagine rising economies within Africa, Asia and Latin America will ignore the cost of proprietary/leased software they can writ…
While I think you have a valid point here, I think matlab marketing department has caught on here and thus offering free student licenses. This is the same strategy employed by MS in at least India. Let them get it for free or give it for free. Also, companies which use matlab and develop a technology lock in are not after the language features, they are after the toolbox features. I hate matlab as a language as much as the next guy, but there isn't any competition for its toolboxes like antenna design, RF design, Risk management, OPC, instrumentation control (this one labview is another horrible but not alternative), etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#26spreadsheets
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in engineering and get the sense that python is going to make MATLAB nearly irrelevant, save maybe for some fancy GUI stuff like simulink. Of course numpy ode solvers can do the same thing as simulink but not as easily.
What kind of engineering are you doing? Do the companies you work for think of software dev as one of their core competence? I work in semi conductor manufacturing and currently employed with one of the largest equipment manufacturers. The technology lock in is fairly strong in this and other companies in this field because of 2 reasons 1. Legacy code is very valuable. Mistakes are costly and thus nobody wants to cha…
I may have a skewed view. Your view is probably more representative of engineering in general. I do nuclear engineering for a relatively young advanced reactor company that does consider software development one of its things. We have the oldest of the old legacy codes for physics solvers (originally written in Fortran IV, now ported to Fortran 90, validated against experimental nuclear reactors that no longer exist) and we use Python for data management and automation.
10 years ago people were using Perl for data management and MATLAB for physics prototyping. Now we all use Python for both.
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#28Quicksort pseudo-code.
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#29I'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not their core competence.
I am pretty sure a FOSS alternative to Matlab will win in a long term. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave.
Re: Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of engineering are you doing? Do the companies you work for think of software dev as one of their core competence? I work in semi conductor manufacturing and currently employed with one of the largest equipment manufacturers. The technology lock in is fairly strong in this and other companies in this field because of 2 reasons 1. Legacy code is very valuable. Mistakes are costly and thus nobody wants to cha…
I may have a skewed view. Your view is probably more representative of engineering in general. I do nuclear engineering for a relatively young advanced reactor company that does consider software development one of its things. We have the oldest of the old legacy codes for physics solvers (originally written in Fortran IV, now ported to Fortran 90, validated against experimental nuclear reactors that no longer exist)…
So basically you have a more outdated legacy and were able to move out of matlab because its just a shell. I can't explain why but that is extremely funny to me.