4 ms·

That is assuming that software is ever written 'correctly', which outside of (semi-) academic exercise is never the case (so far). You can have a program with

That is assuming that software is ever written 'correctly', which outside of (semi-) academic exercise is never the case (so far). You can have a program with 1 purpose and no added features experience a variety of critical flaws over a period of 30 years. While there might not be a 'decay' as such, there definitely is new understanding and as such new attack vectors. The same goes for the stuff the software runs on top of. Your program might be programmed just fine, but if the CPU it was programmed on no longer exists and the replacement CPU has new features that allow that program to be exploited in new ways, that is still a flaw of the software. It couldn't have been foreseen, but it still happens. The concept dat the things we build are frozen in time never holds up. The difference with software vs 'other things' is that it doesn't degrade or get 'used up' (as you wrote yourself). But the things around it do and as you cannot write programs against all possible future contexts, it will need maintenance for as long as it is in use (from a software perspective - a business thinks differently about that, especially risk analysts).

taeric 7y ago
Not really. There is literally precedent in this regard. TeX is stable. Very stable. Has it been extended? Yes. And some extensions can be seen as borderline required. But I'm not unconvinced that one of the biggest factors in this is that he tried to make it stable. And showed great restraint in what requirements to go after.
- oneplane 7y ago
  Which TeX? Over the last 10 years, over 20 serious and critical vulnerabilities have been found in various TeX implementations. They were all fixed via... maintenance.
  - taeric 7y ago
    How many of those were extensions? Pdftex, as an example, is not TeX. There have been roughly, what, eight releases in TeX since version 3? Hence we are now at 3.14159265. This is not to say things couldn't have been done better. But I love that all of my documents still compile just fine. Modern practices? Nope.
    - taeric 7y ago
      Coming back to this after a few days. I also can't help but take a double take at 20 vulnerabilities in 10 years being a serious criticism. Is the implicit claim that this is a bad record compared to other software legit? (Honest question.)

taeric 7y ago

Not really. There is literally precedent in this regard. TeX is stable. Very stable. Has it been extended? Yes. And some extensions can be seen as borderline required. But I'm not unconvinced that one of the biggest factors in this is that he tried to make it stable. And showed great restraint in what requirements to go after.

oneplane 7y ago
Which TeX? Over the last 10 years, over 20 serious and critical vulnerabilities have been found in various TeX implementations. They were all fixed via... maintenance.
- taeric 7y ago
  How many of those were extensions? Pdftex, as an example, is not TeX. There have been roughly, what, eight releases in TeX since version 3? Hence we are now at 3.14159265. This is not to say things couldn't have been done better. But I love that all of my documents still compile just fine. Modern practices? Nope.
  - taeric 7y ago
    Coming back to this after a few days. I also can't help but take a double take at 20 vulnerabilities in 10 years being a serious criticism. Is the implicit claim that this is a bad record compared to other software legit? (Honest question.)