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Back about 20 years ago I built a system for my Dad's company to generate export documentation, manage custom price lists for multiple customers and track inven

by gbuk2013 7y ago

Back about 20 years ago I built a system for my Dad's company to generate export documentation, manage custom price lists for multiple customers and track inventory and factory production, all based around multiple Excel files and a fair bit of VBA code. Fast forward multiple upgrades of Office it still works to this very day! You just have to keep ignoring the scary self-signed certificate warnings. ;) I'm a die-hard Linux guy, but credit where credit is due - Excel is awesome.

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fortran77 7y ago
Meanwhile, your 20 year old Mac software is useless. Heck, even a lot of 10 year old Mac software and some 5-year old is useless if it was 32-bit. Style over function. And not even a lot of style anymore. Yet they're still beloved by many people here. The obvious conclusion: few of those people you see sitting around typing on their MacBooks are doing anything that will be of value 5, 10, or 20 years from now.
- derefr 7y ago
  What percentage of developers who use Macs do you imagine create macOS/iOS software, vs. POSIX software? I’m fine with using an ephemeral toolkit to create long-lasting infra, and it even makes sense to me that some people want to sometimes write new pieces of the ephemeral toolkit to help me do that (like stylish GUI text editors or SFTP clients or notification-area service managers.)
- TheRealSteel 7y ago
  I even have software (Drawful 2) that was released in 2016 and won't run on Catalina because it is 32-bit. That's just three years.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    That’s on the developers to be honest, less so on Apple (but Apple is not entirely guilt free). It was very clear in 2016 that they should’ve been targeting 64bit.
    - UserIsUnused 7y ago
      That's a stupid argument, when comparing to windows examples, were that simply doesn't matter, you develop for current and 20years later it's supported.
    - kerng 7y ago
      Not really, Apple could have just supported running 32 bit apps. Google is pulling similar things in the Play Store. They will pull apps just because they are not 64 bit. They delayed the deadline for a year now, because many developers really don't care. And as a consumer it really does not matter. Why would a 32 bit app not work 10 years from now?
      - oneplane 7y ago
        They could have, but they chose to not have stalled developers on their platform instead.
    - Crinus 7y ago
      There is no technical reason (in that they could technically keep 32bit support) for Apple to drop 32bit support since the x86 CPUs they rely on support them - i've heard that there were some architectural reasons with Cocoa (i think) that made it harder to do that, but they came up with that architecture themselves while knowing that people have invested on 32bit support. They knowingly decided that making the work easier for a handful of people was more important than the many thousands of applications that would break - they put themselves above their customers.
      - twobat 7y ago
        Go ahead and install Wine x86 on a Gentoo x64. Only then you will understand what it means to support 32 bit apps.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  > The obvious conclusion: few of those people you see sitting around typing on their MacBooks are doing anything that will be of value 5, 10, or 20 years from now. Maybe to a troll or someone with an axe to grind, but my point of view is different. If you’re doing the same exact thing 5 years later (let alone 10 or even 20) without any tweaks in your process, then frankly you have a job a robot should be doing. I’ve got production code I wrote twenty years ago still up and running, despite multiple upgrades to the language and hosting Infrastucture itself that it’s running on. Should that be the case? Not in my opinion. Business needs change, that code should’ve been updated. Instead developers just added on more around it and that’s how you get bloated beasts like MS Office, Photoshop, etc.
  - walterstucco666 7y ago
    > If you’re doing the same exact thing 5 years later (let alone 10 or even 20) without any tweaks in your process, then frankly you have a job a robot should be doing. Banks and insurance companies tends to disagree with you. Maintaining software is just like maintaining buildings, if you don't they fall apart, but mainly it's just about checking that everything is still the same it was when it was built. You don't change elevators in a building just because the old model is not supported anymore. There's no conceot of "not maintained anymore" for elevators. So maybe the poster was trolling, but it is true that you cannot rely on Macs if your software has a predicted life span longer than a couple of years. > Business needs change Again, many established businesses work because they don't change much over time. They just keep doing what they do best. > that code should’ve been updated. That code worked, why in the hell risking to introduce new bugs? I worked on software packages made by millions of lines, you don't just update them because your supplier won't bother supporting your workflow for at least 10 years. Even Github, a modern fast changing company, was running on Rails 3.2 that was released in 2012 until September 2018, they switched to 5.2 and it took a tech company with some of the smartest engineers around and Rails contributors one year and a half.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Those are some very naive assumptions you've got there padawan. Sure some software needs to fade away, but just rewriting something to rewrite it is stupid.
- IgorPartola 7y ago
  Yeah! Screw those filthy Mac lovers! They do nothing important. You can tell by the OS they are using! They should get a real computer designed for serious business! I am still using Windows Vista and plan to for the rest of my life! Dude, if you are trolling, don’t. If you aren’t, also don’t.
  - fortran77 7y ago
    I can assure you I'm no troll. I'm just more open-minded than others here. If Microsoft makes the best product, I use it.
    - IgorPartola 7y ago
      Yeah. But you are commenting on what people do with the product, without any basis whatsoever for it. And just curious when was the last time you used a non-MS OS as your daily computer? Am I close with a guess of “not in the last 10 years”?
    - Scapeghost 7y ago
      > I'm just more open-minded than others here. You made a patronizing remark about millions of people you don't know. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452097) To follow up with this comment and putting yourself on a pedestal is definitely trolling, and not very creative either.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    If there is anyone who'd think "screw those filthy Mac lovers" that would be Apple themselves since it is they who are in a position to preserve backwards compatibility and yet they decide to not do so.
    - IgorPartola 7y ago
      As a Mac user, I don’t feel it. I know people get really particular about this shit, but I spend roughly 4 hours every year making macOS do what I want. That’s it. When I ran Ubuntu, it was about 8-12 hours every 6 months. When I ran Windows it was... it was a lot more. Backwards compatibility isn’t as important to me as shit just working. My current setup hasn’t been changed in about 2.5 years. Early 2017 is the last time I opened system settings at all. Sure I periodically install a homebrew package or two, but I consider that to be a part of the normal workflow, not an OS tuning thing. All my other daily software and even stuff I don’t use frequently just works. I know that sounds like I am some kind of fanboy. I assure you I am not. I wish I could go back to Ubuntu where I feel most at home. But the fact that I think so little about my OS that I forget it is there is what makes this so easy for me to stay.
- zelly 7y ago
  Very few of those people using Macbooks are creating software for Apple devices. It is a fashion statement. They could be using any laptop.
  - oneplane 7y ago
    I suppose that depends on where you live or work. Around here there are perhaps 10% of users of any brand who act like that (except in the BlackBerry era where it was part brand, part BBM). The rest just uses what makes sense for their use case.
    - FpUser 7y ago
      I currently do part time consulting in company that has floor full of developers. All Apple. Not a single piece of software they develop actually targets Mac. They do full stack wit cloud and browser targets.
      - oneplane 7y ago
        Most of the companies I visited the last few months have a choice of systems plus a BYOD budget, but still most people prefer getting a Mac, and again, almost none of them are writing software for macOS or iOS, and are as in your example often working for web, cloud or managing *nix servers.
  - graphviz 7y ago
    Graphviz was written on Macs and Linux. Its native OSX container was developed by someone now working at Apple. Most of its code is OS independent. Like everyone, we are not thrilled with MacBooks these days (expensive, not great keyboards, useful ports removed, and seeming love-hate relationship with Unix * ) but if you want to run Office and Lightroom, run typical python data science code, what else is there? A colleague tried the Windows Linux system and it kind of works but not well enough for what we're doing. It's the same everywhere. * Here's a fun exercise: try to dump your iCloud passwords in cleartext so you can scan for potentially compromised passwords on forgotten systems (using shell commands, not a proprietary password manager.) OSX doesn't even generate messages to acknowledge that it's designed to not let you do this.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Well looking at where the Microsoft ecosystem is now and where the Apple ecosystem is, I think Apple made the right choice. Apple alone sells more devices running macOS variants than all Windows PC makers combined. As far as backwards compatibility though - MS’s new ARM based Surface won’t run 64 bit x86 Windows apps and run 32 bit x86 apps slowly and still gets half the advertised life of iPads. Windows on Surface took 12GB of hard drive space compared to about 3GB for iOS on iPads.
  - einr 7y ago
    Apple alone sells more devices running macOS variants than all Windows PC makers combined. Where did you find those numbers? https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4-2018/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4... In Q4 of 2018, Apple sold 4.9 million Macs. Lenovo alone sold 16.6 million PC's. All brands except apple sold 63.7 million.
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    - scarface74 7y ago
      I said MacOS variants - iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Those are three areas where we have recent real numbers from Apple before they stopped reporting volume numbers. I could include Watches and AppleTVs but those are far from generally purpose computing devices.
      - walterstucco666 7y ago
        > iPhones, iPads, and Macs Which is just two variants meanwhile Windows 7 support will end in 2020 and is still being sold https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-support-will-end-on-january-14-2020 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-s...
        scarface74 7y ago
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- Razengan 7y ago
  The obvious conclusion is that there is quite a bit of prejudice and bigotry in your worldview. And if you find this observation unwarranted: you not only made a sweeping generalization against everyone who does X, you authoritatively dismiss all FUTURE potential of their work. It must take no small amount of bitterness to see things that way.
- matthewmacleod 7y ago
  Please be less patronising in the future; it's not a good look. In reality, of course, many people currently "sitting around typing" are doing plenty of useful work using a variety of different tools. There are various tradeoffs to be made when considering the benefits and costs of a strategy for long-term backwards compatibility. Microsoft was traditionally on the "it will continue to work until the heat death of the universe" end of the spectrum, and Apple on the "we will be dropping support soon" end. That is, Microsoft invests a bunch of effort into ensuring old software will continue to run on new platforms, whereas Apple prefers to drop support for various platform features (68k, PPC, 32-bit) with a few years of notice. In some cases and for some users, backwards compatibility has a value that is worth the cost paid in development time, testing, and complexity. For others, it is not. I've been a Mac user since the G4 days, and I don't think I've ever really been in the situation where I thought "oh I need to run this old software but it's no longer supported" – that is, the feature has no value to me. And I'm pretty confident that the things I produce will continue to have value in the future. TLDR – other people are different to you sometimes.
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- whakim 7y ago
  What percentage of code written 20+ years ago is still in production - without any kind of updates - today? Also, many developers use Macs not because they're in love, but because of the practical conveniences of working on a Unix-based OS.
  - osamagirl69 7y ago
    Not every piece of software is a vape-delivery-via-drone-app. I have about a dozen small very specific scientific 'calculators' (only the windows/linux ones that still run, the mac ones are all dead which is a darn shame since there were some jewels out there) that were written by researchers 10-20 years ago and never updated since. They haven't been touched by the original developer in years, in fact many of their host websites have been lost to the ages so they exist only through sharing on forums and whatnot. But, since they do not need any sort of connection to the outside world (times were simpler back then you see...) they still run fine in compatibility mode. For some of them their functionality can be replicated with modern software (probably in a web app or something), but the original tools still work perfectly for their jobs and are still useful today. Don't even get me started on all of the equipment which is stuck running windows 98 because of the serial port library used to communicate with the equipment was using the dos api... examples: Psst! - https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~psst/ https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~psst/ Laser Line - http://www.skywise711.com/laserline/ http://www.skywise711.com/laserline/ I also use a number of paid tools that I paid for back in the '90s or early 2000's and haven't felt compelled to 'upgrade'. They run great and give me the answers I need, so until the vendor has added actual useful features (instead of reskinning them with a flat/metro interface...) I see no reason to upgrade.
    - whakim 7y ago
      I wasn't claiming that there isn't any software built 20+ years ago which hasn't seen updates and yet still works and still has utility. The point is there isn't much of it relative to the wider ecosystem. One particularly important reason for that is security. Most of the dependencies for software written 20+ years ago have long since been EOL'd and are therefore vulnerable.
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- Scapeghost 7y ago
  > few of those people you see sitting around typing on their MacBooks are doing anything that will be of value 5, 10, or 20 years from now. I mean, the people "typing on their MacBooks" combined together have resulted in a company with THE highest value ever in human history, and is copied by all the other companies that you champion.
  - fortran77 7y ago
    1. This morning MSFT's market cap is higher than AAPLs. 2. But that's not how "most valuable" is usually rated by analysts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alapshah/2018/08/02/apple-hits-1-trillion-but-its-still-not-the-most-valuable-company-in-the-world/#274017e12175 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alapshah/2018/08/02/apple-hits-... 3. There are privately held companies that are probably "more valuable", like Saudi Aramco 4. I don't know what I've done (which you asked in your original post), but I know I'm not a fanboy/shill/astroturfer for Apple.
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    - Scapeghost 7y ago
      Alright, so ONE of the highest valued companies ever. > but I know I'm not a fanboy/shill/astroturfer for Apple. No, you're just a hateful individual suffering from brand envy. See? Assumptions are easy and fun indeed!
bluedino 7y ago
Backwards compatiblity. It sounds great. Windows can run the previous version of Office. But running the current version, alongside say, Office 2007, is a major pain in the ass. Maybe you just need to run the old version of Outlook, because your IP phone system or ERP software has some plug-in that was never written for the next version and isn't compatible. Maybe you need to run a version of Access that's so stinking old that you have to use Windows XP in a VM. Now, to make things worse, the database connectors for that version of Access are so outdated, that it's holding the entire company back on MySQL 5.5 because if you upgraded, your Access application wouldn't work anymore. Not to mention, all that code you wrote 20 years ago in VBA is insecure as all hell. Unencrypted connections, ripe for SQL injection, plus that version of Access can't work with large datasets or return large results. Dammit!
- oneplane 7y ago
  Yeah, on the surface that stuff always sounds nice because "see, I can run this thing from 20 years ago and I didn't have to do any extra work" sounds nice, but that also means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years... I'd rather have planned deprecation and make choices to (at some point) abandon certain APIs, features and formats. In the case of formats, a public release of some parser code would be nice, so that if someone really wants to get some old data, they can, but other than that, stagnation isn't as good as people make it out to be.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    This looks like very idealistic approach. The world does not revolve around perfectionist's wishes. As for "...means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years..." - the OS did maintain the old API's and the way they behave to make sure old software that uses said APIs still works on new OS. Does not mean that the new APIs were not developed.
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    > Yeah, on the surface that stuff always sounds nice because "see, I can run this thing from 20 years ago and I didn't have to do any extra work" sounds nice, but that also means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years... Some things don't need intensive maintenance, and it's a bad thing to force it for unnecessary reasons. Backwards compatibility can often be understood as 10 vendor engineers performing maintenance effort so 10,000 customer engineers don't have to. It's a massive productivity win for society. I'm a software engineer. I hate working on ancient codebases as much as the next guy, and I personally benefit from the constant make-work of re-engineering. But, as a customer, I'd rather invest my time and money to solve new problems, rather than spend it re-solving old problems.
MegaDeKay 7y ago
As another Linux fan, you are indeed correct that Excel is awesome. But I think Visio is awesomer. You have LibreOffice Calc that gets within the ballpark of Excel, but nothing is decently close to Visio on Linux.

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fortran77 7y ago

Meanwhile, your 20 year old Mac software is useless. Heck, even a lot of 10 year old Mac software and some 5-year old is useless if it was 32-bit. Style over function. And not even a lot of style anymore. Yet they're still beloved by many people here. The obvious conclusion: few of those people you see sitting around typing on their MacBooks are doing anything that will be of value 5, 10, or 20 years from now.

derefr 7y ago
What percentage of developers who use Macs do you imagine create macOS/iOS software, vs. POSIX software? I’m fine with using an ephemeral toolkit to create long-lasting infra, and it even makes sense to me that some people want to sometimes write new pieces of the ephemeral toolkit to help me do that (like stylish GUI text editors or SFTP clients or notification-area service managers.)
TheRealSteel 7y ago
I even have software (Drawful 2) that was released in 2016 and won't run on Catalina because it is 32-bit. That's just three years.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  That’s on the developers to be honest, less so on Apple (but Apple is not entirely guilt free). It was very clear in 2016 that they should’ve been targeting 64bit.
  - UserIsUnused 7y ago
    That's a stupid argument, when comparing to windows examples, were that simply doesn't matter, you develop for current and 20years later it's supported.
  - kerng 7y ago
    Not really, Apple could have just supported running 32 bit apps. Google is pulling similar things in the Play Store. They will pull apps just because they are not 64 bit. They delayed the deadline for a year now, because many developers really don't care. And as a consumer it really does not matter. Why would a 32 bit app not work 10 years from now?
    - oneplane 7y ago
      They could have, but they chose to not have stalled developers on their platform instead.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    There is no technical reason (in that they could technically keep 32bit support) for Apple to drop 32bit support since the x86 CPUs they rely on support them - i've heard that there were some architectural reasons with Cocoa (i think) that made it harder to do that, but they came up with that architecture themselves while knowing that people have invested on 32bit support. They knowingly decided that making the work easier for a handful of people was more important than the many thousands of applications that would break - they put themselves above their customers.
    - twobat 7y ago
      Go ahead and install Wine x86 on a Gentoo x64. Only then you will understand what it means to support 32 bit apps.
jsjohnst 7y ago
> The obvious conclusion: few of those people you see sitting around typing on their MacBooks are doing anything that will be of value 5, 10, or 20 years from now. Maybe to a troll or someone with an axe to grind, but my point of view is different. If you’re doing the same exact thing 5 years later (let alone 10 or even 20) without any tweaks in your process, then frankly you have a job a robot should be doing. I’ve got production code I wrote twenty years ago still up and running, despite multiple upgrades to the language and hosting Infrastucture itself that it’s running on. Should that be the case? Not in my opinion. Business needs change, that code should’ve been updated. Instead developers just added on more around it and that’s how you get bloated beasts like MS Office, Photoshop, etc.
- walterstucco666 7y ago
  > If you’re doing the same exact thing 5 years later (let alone 10 or even 20) without any tweaks in your process, then frankly you have a job a robot should be doing. Banks and insurance companies tends to disagree with you. Maintaining software is just like maintaining buildings, if you don't they fall apart, but mainly it's just about checking that everything is still the same it was when it was built. You don't change elevators in a building just because the old model is not supported anymore. There's no conceot of "not maintained anymore" for elevators. So maybe the poster was trolling, but it is true that you cannot rely on Macs if your software has a predicted life span longer than a couple of years. > Business needs change Again, many established businesses work because they don't change much over time. They just keep doing what they do best. > that code should’ve been updated. That code worked, why in the hell risking to introduce new bugs? I worked on software packages made by millions of lines, you don't just update them because your supplier won't bother supporting your workflow for at least 10 years. Even Github, a modern fast changing company, was running on Rails 3.2 that was released in 2012 until September 2018, they switched to 5.2 and it took a tech company with some of the smartest engineers around and Rails contributors one year and a half.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Those are some very naive assumptions you've got there padawan. Sure some software needs to fade away, but just rewriting something to rewrite it is stupid.
IgorPartola 7y ago
Yeah! Screw those filthy Mac lovers! They do nothing important. You can tell by the OS they are using! They should get a real computer designed for serious business! I am still using Windows Vista and plan to for the rest of my life! Dude, if you are trolling, don’t. If you aren’t, also don’t.
- fortran77 7y ago
  I can assure you I'm no troll. I'm just more open-minded than others here. If Microsoft makes the best product, I use it.
  - IgorPartola 7y ago
    Yeah. But you are commenting on what people do with the product, without any basis whatsoever for it. And just curious when was the last time you used a non-MS OS as your daily computer? Am I close with a guess of “not in the last 10 years”?
  - Scapeghost 7y ago
    > I'm just more open-minded than others here. You made a patronizing remark about millions of people you don't know. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452097) To follow up with this comment and putting yourself on a pedestal is definitely trolling, and not very creative either.
- Crinus 7y ago
  If there is anyone who'd think "screw those filthy Mac lovers" that would be Apple themselves since it is they who are in a position to preserve backwards compatibility and yet they decide to not do so.
  - IgorPartola 7y ago
    As a Mac user, I don’t feel it. I know people get really particular about this shit, but I spend roughly 4 hours every year making macOS do what I want. That’s it. When I ran Ubuntu, it was about 8-12 hours every 6 months. When I ran Windows it was... it was a lot more. Backwards compatibility isn’t as important to me as shit just working. My current setup hasn’t been changed in about 2.5 years. Early 2017 is the last time I opened system settings at all. Sure I periodically install a homebrew package or two, but I consider that to be a part of the normal workflow, not an OS tuning thing. All my other daily software and even stuff I don’t use frequently just works. I know that sounds like I am some kind of fanboy. I assure you I am not. I wish I could go back to Ubuntu where I feel most at home. But the fact that I think so little about my OS that I forget it is there is what makes this so easy for me to stay.
zelly 7y ago
Very few of those people using Macbooks are creating software for Apple devices. It is a fashion statement. They could be using any laptop.
- oneplane 7y ago
  I suppose that depends on where you live or work. Around here there are perhaps 10% of users of any brand who act like that (except in the BlackBerry era where it was part brand, part BBM). The rest just uses what makes sense for their use case.
  - FpUser 7y ago
    I currently do part time consulting in company that has floor full of developers. All Apple. Not a single piece of software they develop actually targets Mac. They do full stack wit cloud and browser targets.
    - oneplane 7y ago
      Most of the companies I visited the last few months have a choice of systems plus a BYOD budget, but still most people prefer getting a Mac, and again, almost none of them are writing software for macOS or iOS, and are as in your example often working for web, cloud or managing *nix servers.
- graphviz 7y ago
  Graphviz was written on Macs and Linux. Its native OSX container was developed by someone now working at Apple. Most of its code is OS independent. Like everyone, we are not thrilled with MacBooks these days (expensive, not great keyboards, useful ports removed, and seeming love-hate relationship with Unix * ) but if you want to run Office and Lightroom, run typical python data science code, what else is there? A colleague tried the Windows Linux system and it kind of works but not well enough for what we're doing. It's the same everywhere. * Here's a fun exercise: try to dump your iCloud passwords in cleartext so you can scan for potentially compromised passwords on forgotten systems (using shell commands, not a proprietary password manager.) OSX doesn't even generate messages to acknowledge that it's designed to not let you do this.
scarface74 7y ago
Well looking at where the Microsoft ecosystem is now and where the Apple ecosystem is, I think Apple made the right choice. Apple alone sells more devices running macOS variants than all Windows PC makers combined. As far as backwards compatibility though - MS’s new ARM based Surface won’t run 64 bit x86 Windows apps and run 32 bit x86 apps slowly and still gets half the advertised life of iPads. Windows on Surface took 12GB of hard drive space compared to about 3GB for iOS on iPads.
- einr 7y ago
  Apple alone sells more devices running macOS variants than all Windows PC makers combined. Where did you find those numbers? https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4-2018/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/10/apple-mac-sales-drop-q4... In Q4 of 2018, Apple sold 4.9 million Macs. Lenovo alone sold 16.6 million PC's. All brands except apple sold 63.7 million.
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  - scarface74 7y ago
    I said MacOS variants - iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Those are three areas where we have recent real numbers from Apple before they stopped reporting volume numbers. I could include Watches and AppleTVs but those are far from generally purpose computing devices.
    - walterstucco666 7y ago
      > iPhones, iPads, and Macs Which is just two variants meanwhile Windows 7 support will end in 2020 and is still being sold https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-support-will-end-on-january-14-2020 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-s...
      - scarface74 7y ago
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Razengan 7y ago
The obvious conclusion is that there is quite a bit of prejudice and bigotry in your worldview. And if you find this observation unwarranted: you not only made a sweeping generalization against everyone who does X, you authoritatively dismiss all FUTURE potential of their work. It must take no small amount of bitterness to see things that way.
matthewmacleod 7y ago
Please be less patronising in the future; it's not a good look. In reality, of course, many people currently "sitting around typing" are doing plenty of useful work using a variety of different tools. There are various tradeoffs to be made when considering the benefits and costs of a strategy for long-term backwards compatibility. Microsoft was traditionally on the "it will continue to work until the heat death of the universe" end of the spectrum, and Apple on the "we will be dropping support soon" end. That is, Microsoft invests a bunch of effort into ensuring old software will continue to run on new platforms, whereas Apple prefers to drop support for various platform features (68k, PPC, 32-bit) with a few years of notice. In some cases and for some users, backwards compatibility has a value that is worth the cost paid in development time, testing, and complexity. For others, it is not. I've been a Mac user since the G4 days, and I don't think I've ever really been in the situation where I thought "oh I need to run this old software but it's no longer supported" – that is, the feature has no value to me. And I'm pretty confident that the things I produce will continue to have value in the future. TLDR – other people are different to you sometimes.
- deleted 7y ago
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whakim 7y ago
What percentage of code written 20+ years ago is still in production - without any kind of updates - today? Also, many developers use Macs not because they're in love, but because of the practical conveniences of working on a Unix-based OS.
- osamagirl69 7y ago
  Not every piece of software is a vape-delivery-via-drone-app. I have about a dozen small very specific scientific 'calculators' (only the windows/linux ones that still run, the mac ones are all dead which is a darn shame since there were some jewels out there) that were written by researchers 10-20 years ago and never updated since. They haven't been touched by the original developer in years, in fact many of their host websites have been lost to the ages so they exist only through sharing on forums and whatnot. But, since they do not need any sort of connection to the outside world (times were simpler back then you see...) they still run fine in compatibility mode. For some of them their functionality can be replicated with modern software (probably in a web app or something), but the original tools still work perfectly for their jobs and are still useful today. Don't even get me started on all of the equipment which is stuck running windows 98 because of the serial port library used to communicate with the equipment was using the dos api... examples: Psst! - https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~psst/ https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~psst/ Laser Line - http://www.skywise711.com/laserline/ http://www.skywise711.com/laserline/ I also use a number of paid tools that I paid for back in the '90s or early 2000's and haven't felt compelled to 'upgrade'. They run great and give me the answers I need, so until the vendor has added actual useful features (instead of reskinning them with a flat/metro interface...) I see no reason to upgrade.
  - whakim 7y ago
    I wasn't claiming that there isn't any software built 20+ years ago which hasn't seen updates and yet still works and still has utility. The point is there isn't much of it relative to the wider ecosystem. One particularly important reason for that is security. Most of the dependencies for software written 20+ years ago have long since been EOL'd and are therefore vulnerable.
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Scapeghost 7y ago
> few of those people you see sitting around typing on their MacBooks are doing anything that will be of value 5, 10, or 20 years from now. I mean, the people "typing on their MacBooks" combined together have resulted in a company with THE highest value ever in human history, and is copied by all the other companies that you champion.
- fortran77 7y ago
  1. This morning MSFT's market cap is higher than AAPLs. 2. But that's not how "most valuable" is usually rated by analysts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alapshah/2018/08/02/apple-hits-1-trillion-but-its-still-not-the-most-valuable-company-in-the-world/#274017e12175 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alapshah/2018/08/02/apple-hits-... 3. There are privately held companies that are probably "more valuable", like Saudi Aramco 4. I don't know what I've done (which you asked in your original post), but I know I'm not a fanboy/shill/astroturfer for Apple.
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  - Scapeghost 7y ago
    Alright, so ONE of the highest valued companies ever. > but I know I'm not a fanboy/shill/astroturfer for Apple. No, you're just a hateful individual suffering from brand envy. See? Assumptions are easy and fun indeed!

bluedino 7y ago

Backwards compatiblity. It sounds great. Windows can run the previous version of Office. But running the current version, alongside say, Office 2007, is a major pain in the ass. Maybe you just need to run the old version of Outlook, because your IP phone system or ERP software has some plug-in that was never written for the next version and isn't compatible. Maybe you need to run a version of Access that's so stinking old that you have to use Windows XP in a VM. Now, to make things worse, the database connectors for that version of Access are so outdated, that it's holding the entire company back on MySQL 5.5 because if you upgraded, your Access application wouldn't work anymore. Not to mention, all that code you wrote 20 years ago in VBA is insecure as all hell. Unencrypted connections, ripe for SQL injection, plus that version of Access can't work with large datasets or return large results. Dammit!

oneplane 7y ago
Yeah, on the surface that stuff always sounds nice because "see, I can run this thing from 20 years ago and I didn't have to do any extra work" sounds nice, but that also means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years... I'd rather have planned deprecation and make choices to (at some point) abandon certain APIs, features and formats. In the case of formats, a public release of some parser code would be nice, so that if someone really wants to get some old data, they can, but other than that, stagnation isn't as good as people make it out to be.
- FpUser 7y ago
  This looks like very idealistic approach. The world does not revolve around perfectionist's wishes. As for "...means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years..." - the OS did maintain the old API's and the way they behave to make sure old software that uses said APIs still works on new OS. Does not mean that the new APIs were not developed.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > Yeah, on the surface that stuff always sounds nice because "see, I can run this thing from 20 years ago and I didn't have to do any extra work" sounds nice, but that also means it hasn't been maintained for 20 years... Some things don't need intensive maintenance, and it's a bad thing to force it for unnecessary reasons. Backwards compatibility can often be understood as 10 vendor engineers performing maintenance effort so 10,000 customer engineers don't have to. It's a massive productivity win for society. I'm a software engineer. I hate working on ancient codebases as much as the next guy, and I personally benefit from the constant make-work of re-engineering. But, as a customer, I'd rather invest my time and money to solve new problems, rather than spend it re-solving old problems.

MegaDeKay 7y ago

As another Linux fan, you are indeed correct that Excel is awesome. But I think Visio is awesomer. You have LibreOffice Calc that gets within the ballpark of Excel, but nothing is decently close to Visio on Linux.