3 ms·
If "will this be usable in ten years?" is a concern, then you shouldn't be worried about your language choice. You should be worried about the services your pro
by wtracy 7y ago
If "will this be usable in ten years?" is a concern, then you shouldn't be worried about your language choice. You should be worried about the services your program depends on.
Does your mobile app do anything useful if Google shuts down their authentication servers? What happens to your users if the App Store/Play Store decides to purge applications that don't actively support recent APIs? What happens when the Maven repositories your build depends on get shut down?
I would much rather figure out how to build a Rust program in ten years than try to recreate a web service that simply no longer exists.
While we're at it: All the "obscure" languages discussed here are FOSS. Finding an implementation will be relatively easy, and having access to the source means that things like binary compatibility issues can be worked around.
This is nothing like trying to resurrect a program written in an obscure proprietary dialect of Pascal that was only made available on a run of 200 floppy disks.
- zzo38computer 7y agoPrograms I write are generally designed not to depend on any particular internet services (if they need some, they are configurable), and this is part of the reason to do. And, yes in the case of these FOSS it is probably easily enough to find an implementation and to work around the binary compatibility issues. In the case of a program written in an obscure proprietary dialect of Pascal that you do not have an implementation of, well, sometimes you might reimplement a subset which is enough to run these programs (I have done similar things in the past), although of course it is probably going to take longer and be more difficult than FOSS is going to be.