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"There are also many smaller improvements, including a fix for a bug which is at least 31 years old."

• benj111 8y ago
  Its weird that web pages can succumb to link rot so quickly, apps succumb to bit rot almost as quickly, but a bug will live on. In a thousand years time will archeologists study us through the bugs left behind in Linux 1300.05 and windows (30)95? Do you think there will still be jobs for Cobol programmers?
  • perlgeek 8y ago
    > but a bug will live on. Sometimes, yes. But it has also happened often to me that an old bug I was trying to fix was simply gone, either because the error mode has gone away, or the feature that the bug related to has been removed.
    • msla 8y ago
      > But it has also happened often to me that an old bug I was trying to fix was simply gone, either because the error mode has gone away, or the feature that the bug related to has been removed. And this is why groups like the OpenBSD team and the Linux kernel team are so eager to remove support for old hardware. Removing support for the 80386 cleaned up code which no longer had to have special cases to handle opcodes and features the 80386 doesn't have but later x86 processors do.
  • gumby 8y ago
    It will be the "junk DNA" of the source code -- because of workarounds and baked in assumptions it will be impossible to eradicate.
  • indyz 8y ago
    Something similar is actually a plot point in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep".