4 ms·

"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50, Apple II is obsolete now, Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is

"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50, Apple II is obsolete now, Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years. This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."

oblio 5y ago
Only partially true. A very young industry changes rapidly, but as it matures it slows down. IT has already started slowing down. See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable. Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same. Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.
FeepingCreature 5y ago
For perspective: The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old. [1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux [2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...
- simonh 5y ago
  All of which are much more like layers of sedimentary rock, unknown and invisible to most people, than they are like cathedrals admired by all.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Coreutils are starting to get competitors rewritten in Rust, though.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  And I see 20 year olds downgrading their Ryzen powered workstation to the same experience I was having putting DG/UX xterm sessions on IBM X Windows terminals in 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal One wonders why they have bothered to pay for such hardware in first place. Then I remember about Electron and Docker.

oblio 5y ago

Only partially true. A very young industry changes rapidly, but as it matures it slows down. IT has already started slowing down. See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable. Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same. Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

For perspective: The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old. [1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux [2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...

simonh 5y ago
All of which are much more like layers of sedimentary rock, unknown and invisible to most people, than they are like cathedrals admired by all.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Coreutils are starting to get competitors rewritten in Rust, though.
pjmlp 5y ago
And I see 20 year olds downgrading their Ryzen powered workstation to the same experience I was having putting DG/UX xterm sessions on IBM X Windows terminals in 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal One wonders why they have bothered to pay for such hardware in first place. Then I remember about Electron and Docker.