7 ms·
Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever?
My answer git, bitcoin, wikipedia
- amypinka 6y agoLibc, zlib, sqlite3
- _jon_ 6y agoMS Excel
- gentryb 6y agoemacs
- searchableguy 6y agoelectron, chrome
- branon 6y agonot if there's any sense left in the world
- dutymainttech 6y agovi / vim
- hackerman123469 6y agowinrar
- mcv 6y agoAnything written in COBOL.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- newswasboring 6y agoI'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not their core competence.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoI'm in engineering and get the sense that python is going to make MATLAB nearly irrelevant, save maybe for some fancy GUI stuff like simulink. Of course numpy ode solvers can do the same thing as simulink but not as easily.
- newswasboring 6y agoWhat kind of engineering are you doing? Do the companies you work for think of software dev as one of their core competence? I work in semi conductor manufacturing and currently employed with one of the largest equipment manufacturers. The technology lock in is fairly strong in this and other companies in this field because of 2 reasons 1. Legacy code is very valuable. Mistakes are costly and thus nobody wants to change anything once its proven to work. 2. They hire people who are already proficient in matlab. In all job postings it is written explicitly as a requirement. There have been and will be initiatives to move over to other languages but they always die out because the cost is monumentally high
- acidburnNSA 6y agoI may have a skewed view. Your view is probably more representative of engineering in general. I do nuclear engineering for a relatively young advanced reactor company that does consider software development one of its things. We have the oldest of the old legacy codes for physics solvers (originally written in Fortran IV, now ported to Fortran 90, validated against experimental nuclear reactors that no longer exist) and we use Python for data management and automation. 10 years ago people were using Perl for data management and MATLAB for physics prototyping. Now we all use Python for both.
- newswasboring 6y agoSo basically you have a more outdated legacy and were able to move out of matlab because its just a shell. I can't explain why but that is extremely funny to me.
- 6y ago
- m1kal 6y agoTeX, BLAS, Vim and Emacs
- gnulinux 6y agoBLAS API will probably last forever but the actual implementation library people use today may not. I suspect the same may be true for vim in the very long run, maybe someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular (like vi vs vim). I find it unlikely that that'll happen to Emacs since it's extremely complex, maybe we'll just move on before that happens.
- routerl 6y ago> someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular (like vi vs vim). https://neovim.io/ https://neovim.io/
- downerending 6y agore BLAS, we may hope, but it appears that BLAS and friends probably single-handedly kept FORTRAN from dying off. And I suspect both will live forever. As for Emacs, it's probably just "good enough" underneath the covers to never draw a rewrite. More fun to spend time hacking elisp.
- rocco337 6y agoirfan view
- RandomBacon 6y agoLinux, PHP
- ntnlabs 6y agocobol, obviously :)
- joseluis 6y agoPong, Tetris, Forth
- benologist 6y agoI don't think much software will be useful even for one century because of competing implementations, changing requirements etc, but Github could be an archaeological treasure-trove one day.
- brutt 6y ago/usr/bin/true
- happyrock 6y ago/usr/bin/yes
- reikonomusha 6y ago75% of code in Common Lisp.
- postcynical 6y agoleftPad
- koolhead17 6y agospreadsheets
- Tomte 6y agoQuicksort pseudo-code.
- lasereyes136 6y agoNothing lasts forever. No software, no programming languages, no operating systems. They will all pass out of use. I see only git, vim, and emacs lasting until the end of my life.
- enjoyyourlife 6y agoC
- helij 6y agoI would say some form of spreadsheet software will be with us for awhile.
- zzo38computer 6y agoI doubt it will last forever, but some things will last much longer than others, such as possibly TeX.
- c22 6y agoWindows XP. I still see it running ancient kiosks and machine tools.
- jamieweb 6y agoAMI BIOS?
- sgillen 6y agoThe Linux kernel. Just because it’s everywhere right now. Even in 1000 years when hardware has moved on, someone will want to virtualize/emulate some hardware that was running Linux.
- davegulimlim 6y agoSAP will last forever.
- m33k44 6y agoHello World examples.
- CM30 6y agoDoes the browser stack (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) count as software? If so, I don't see any of those going anywhere. The world wide web probably isn't going to be replaced anytime soon, and web browser fundamentals probably aren't going to change either. Then again, programming languages and scripting languages in general seem like they'll last forever. Sites and programs may come and go, but the languages they're written in will probably be around for the long haul.
- pdimitar 6y agosqlite, definitely. It has a multitude of possible applications and you can built on top of it to make a more advanced use-case possible.