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Why Does Software Rot?

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Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#31

Post by nickysielicki »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #14
boznz wrote: post #10

Unless your sandboxed in a self contained hardware and software environment (such as an embedded system) you will eventually be screwed. (rot sounds like a gradual degradation its generally not in my position) Standards changes and OS Updates are the biggest culprit; The Vista update broke a couple of my old programs (written for Windows 95) due to the user access control changes, another was broke due to the fact it…

This is because there's little glory in simply making things work. There is glory in making things that look shiny and new. As they say, "Absolutem Obsoletum". And congratulations on understanding exactly why I prefer embedded systems - you don't have to keep chasing the dragon of the fashionable new thing ( which is invariably old wine in new skins ). It is not that there is no new wine it is just that proportionall…

semi-related: a couple months ago I found a large industrial shipping scale in my parents basement. I grabbed an FTDI USB -> RS232 cable and a DB25 -> DB9 cable, plugged it into a Raspberry Pi, and hacked this together:

https://gist.github.com/sielickin/8cc79f0cb6a4b4c229b9786dff...

There are some nasty hacks in there and probably a few bugs that I could fix up at some point, but it works just fine!

I love how in a little more than 100 lines of Go code, I can so easily have a program with a dedicated thread to reading data from the serial port, a dedicated thread to serving up the initial http page to clients, a dedicated thread for sending data to websocket clients, and all of it works together so cleanly with messaging through channels.

I copy-pasted some d3.js code from around the web, retrofitted it, and in maybe 2 hours of work I have something pretty cool.

My Mom runs an ecommerce website and uses another scale for shipping, I wonder how hard it would be to write a driver for Windows that consumes data over the network and would interface with her shipping label software.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#32

Post by beat »

bostik wrote: post #30
beat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some smart dude, don't remember who, said that every single line of code becomes technical debt the moment it is written.

Legacy software is the code you wrote before lunch.[0] 0: http://www.russmiles.com/essais/dont-think-legacy-software-t...

That's not the one I was thinking of, but it's a similar sentiment.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#33

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Asooka wrote: post #25
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because there's little glory in simply making things work. There is glory in making things that look shiny and new. As they say, "Absolutem Obsoletum". And congratulations on understanding exactly why I prefer embedded systems - you don't have to keep chasing the dragon of the fashionable new thing ( which is invariably old wine in new skins ). It is not that there is no new wine it is just that proportionall…

In a way, isn't this a form of make-work for software engineers? Plus, I'm not sure what is worse - having to remake things every 5 years or so slightly differently, or not having jobs.

In a way. It's hard to stay focused; they used to say the ultimate for a CS grad was to write the Great American Compiler ( as for an English major it may have been the Great American Novel ). As per Orwell, the hardest thing anyone does is to see what's right under their nose - to stay focused and commit to the most relevant work.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#34

Post by joe_the_user »

jussaskin wrote: post #9

Software rots if you can no longer set up the exact tool chain and environment (compiler, build tool, OS version, external database, etc) required to build and run it. Even interpreted languages suffer from this problem as features are subtlely changed - by design or accident. It doesn't matter if your project is using an ancient version of VC++ or a two year old version of NodeJS. If it doesn't keep up with the late…

Your claim does not really follow the standard meaning.

Bit Rot is usually defined as all the ways that software can appear to stop serving it's function despite remaining the same, in the sense of being the same bits (or bytecode or interpreted code) run by the same computer.

"the software does not actually decay, but rather suffers from a lack of being responsive and updated with respect to the changing environment in which it resides."

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot

Edit: Not being able to recreate or modify a given piece of software would an example of the bit of your tools/environment and this is one (but the only) source of bitrot in a piece of code.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#35

Post by WorldMaker »

An interesting simile here is that software rots in the same way that Encyclopedias do.

(This is admittedly a fitting simile partly because the simile itself is being rotted by software like Wikipedia.)

In the world where new Encyclopedias (and Almanacs and Recipe Books) were printed and sold on an annual basis, the question was often why do we need "this year's Encyclopedia" when the old one is still perfectly valid. Books in general decay pretty slowly and have a long shelf life, but the facts and the views in the world inside them are frozen and possibly. Changes from year to year of an Encyclopedia are somewhat hard to notice, but in Middle School in the 90s I recall having to compare articles from a tobacco yellowed Encyclopedia set from the 70s to trips to the same articles from very early predecessors of Wikipedia. The worlds contained in those two sorts of Encyclopedias were very interestingly diverging. The yellowed Encyclopedia's facts were almost all still valid and "worked", but there were things that didn't hold up and lots of new facts that needed to be inserted in various places. If I were to edit an Encyclopedia, I'm not sure I would start from the version in that yellowed Encyclopedia if I could find a more recent set. Some of the predecessors to Wikipedia were direct descendants of that yellowed Encyclopedia and yet for various reasons historical and technical, Wikipedia itself did not inherit directly from that set in any meaningful way.

(It's interesting to note too that the physical media of software to date has a much shorter shelf life than the pulp medium of books, tobacco-smoke-filled library aging included, so argument exists that software rots worse than Encyclopedias physically, at least.)

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#36

Post by codemac »

jussaskin wrote: post #9

Software rots if you can no longer set up the exact tool chain and environment (compiler, build tool, OS version, external database, etc) required to build and run it. Even interpreted languages suffer from this problem as features are subtlely changed - by design or accident. It doesn't matter if your project is using an ancient version of VC++ or a two year old version of NodeJS. If it doesn't keep up with the late…

I think this is an interesting argument for something like scheme (r5rs or r7rs-small) where you could hypothetically implement an interpreter later for the same code base with much less trouble.

Mind you, it probably won't perform well or do everything, but you can imagine it'd be easier than implementing an entire VM.

Unless it's video games.

People will write mountains of software to play an old video game.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#37

Post by joe_the_user »

WorldMaker wrote: post #35

An interesting simile here is that software rots in the same way that Encyclopedias do. (This is admittedly a fitting simile partly because the simile itself is being rotted by software like Wikipedia.) In the world where new Encyclopedias (and Almanacs and Recipe Books) were printed and sold on an annual basis, the question was often why do we need "this year's Encyclopedia" when the old one is still perfectly valid…

It's a nice analogy but there are important differences here.

The thing is that the process of encyclopedias roting/going-out-of-date is obvious because we understand that an encyclopedia is a collection of assertions about the world. It is not as obvious that software is also a set of assertions about the world - and it's not as easy to determine which assertions about the world the software depends on.

Just as much, an encyclopedia is a static list of supposed facts and its change is somewhat predictable by in terms of how our understanding of the world changes. We have some idea what will be valid or invalid in an encyclopedia X years old.

Software depends on obscure facts about OSes, about networks, about UI expectations, about time, and so-forth and moreover, software involves chains of dependencies so it's harder to predict what would or wouldn't break software X years old.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#38

Post by brownbat »

Note, article is not talking about bit rot, I think that's confusing a lot of people.

The point might be clearer as:

"Adaptability and efficiency are opposing priorities."

Ecosystems face this too. A stable environment will lead to adaptations that improve efficiency, while creating new dependencies on everything staying the same. In a sense, species are constantly competing to make the ecosystem more fragile.

If this holds, there are broad impacts to information systems outside of software. broader impact of this. We like to fantasize about the mind being immortal. Maybe we could fix the telemere thing, figure out cancer, hop our brain to a clone, or upload our consciousness to some cloud.

But in my experience, being mentally alive involves some mix of plasticity and progressive refinement. You can't have both forever.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#39

Post by ArkyBeagle »

nickysielicki wrote: post #31
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because there's little glory in simply making things work. There is glory in making things that look shiny and new. As they say, "Absolutem Obsoletum". And congratulations on understanding exactly why I prefer embedded systems - you don't have to keep chasing the dragon of the fashionable new thing ( which is invariably old wine in new skins ). It is not that there is no new wine it is just that proportionall…

semi-related: a couple months ago I found a large industrial shipping scale in my parents basement. I grabbed an FTDI USB -> RS232 cable and a DB25 -> DB9 cable, plugged it into a Raspberry Pi, and hacked this together: https://gist.github.com/sielickin/8cc79f0cb6a4b4c229b9786dff... There are some nasty hacks in there and probably a few bugs that I could fix up at some point, but it works just fine! I love how in a l…

That's amazing - thanks for showing me that. I have much to learn that-a-way.

Re: Why Does Software Rot?

#40

Post by fallous »

In most of the cases discussed in the article, it's not the software that rots but instead the users and/or organization that decays. When a system is created, it is generally designed to solve a known set of problems encountered by an existing population of users. Over time, the tool creators, original users, and the current problem domains change but often the old system is modified to solve these changes. A flexible system may be adaptable to certain amounts of change, but only if the current populace of creators/maintainers as well as users understand the limits. If they do not, the software often ends up less useful than if it had never been touched.
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