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

91–100 of 193 posts

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

#91

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

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…

The JS ecosystem’s churn is unusually bad. I wouldn’t use that as a representative example.

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

#92

Post by dolmen »

I found mine too, archived in 2001, but my browser can't run Java applets anymore.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010407081008/http://www.multim...

In fact I noticed 10 years after the publishing when I tried to run the applet that it didn't even run because the compiler of that time had generated invalid byte code (not caught by the JVM) or that the source code itself was invalid and that had not been caught by the compiler. "Compile Once, Run Everywhere", they said.

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

#93

Post by darkstar_16 »

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…

Are you me ? I wrote an exact program like this in GW Basic back in the day. I remember adding the ability to draw coloured lines but I had no way to verify since my computer monitor was one of those with green coloured pixels. Finally got to see everything in full colour at my school lab and was so thrilled. Those were the days ...

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by robertlagrant »

vbezhenar wrote: post #36
Takennickname wrote: post #30

What a strong ad for Java

2011 for Java is nothing. I've used JDBC driver written for Java 1.4 (2002) in Java 17 and I absolutely sure that it'll work with Java 21 just as well. Java backwards compatibility is real and it works absolutely fine unless you do bad things.

I think the last breaking change I remember was enumerations being added, which broke any code that used the class name as a variable name. But I could be wrong; it was almost 20 years ago.

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

#96

Post by xandrius »

fragmede wrote: post #90
squigz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shit, I learned to program before there was Google .

I studied OpenGL when all I could find was literally 1 tutorial on it and it was not in my native language.

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

#97

Post by xandrius »

fragmede wrote: post #78
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.

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…

What a world we must have lived in without VSCode, TS and rust, a truly undistinguishable one it seems.

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

#98

Post by dolmen »

brlcad wrote: post #26

Boggles my mind when coders don't save everything they've ever written. It's easy to be a digital pack-rat without much consequence. That said, my first Java 1.02 programs from the 90's still compile and the old jars run surprisingly well too. Color me impressed!

Being a programmer and being an archivist are two different mindset and two different jobs.

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

#99

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

_ZeD_ wrote: post #43
Takennickname wrote: post #30

What a strong ad for Java

that should be the norm. the reality is that is a strong ad against almost all modern frameworks, that may live for as little as a football season

Not really. Not automatically, anyway. Realistically, code lasting forever is, the majority of the time, some engineer’s nerdy wet dream almost completely devoid from any real-world requirements. “This code should last 20 years” should, for most people, be fairly low on the list of desires for a technology stack. In the vast majority of cases, the processes that the software seeks to automate will have been thrown out LONG before then. The business went bust and the only surviving copy is on some developer’s personal computer. Darlene from accounting left and her replacement likes to do things differently, so all this custom stuff was replaced with something off-the-shelf. Your $40B unicorn dating network very unceremoniously fell from the charts after Gen Z decided to throw their phones away and connect in person like we used to. After all that, you’re left there holding a perfectly functional(?) solution to a problem nobody is asking to be solved anymore.

Let’s be clear: I know that banks run on COBOL. Everyone knows that. Please don’t say it. I can name 5-10 other industries off the top of my head where this sort of longevity matters. But let’s not kid ourselves that the stuff we’re writing is even intended to last a long time.

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

#100

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

anthk wrote: post #50
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #9

My first program was a mIRC script :D

Well, I've seen the opposite: an awk script to connect to IRC...

One of my first programs was the sensible center: an IRC bot written in Perl.
Post reply on HN