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No building stands for 100 years without maintenance. 100 years ago heating and light by coal or gas were still common, so every single old building has had upg
by estaseuropano 5y ago
No building stands for 100 years without maintenance. 100 years ago heating and light by coal or gas were still common, so every single old building has had upgrades to electricity (or first gas, then electric). The roof leaked, the wood rotted, a bunch of people died in a fire and now all buildings in a similar style need to add a fire escape...
- titzer 5y agoThere are hundreds of churches in Europe who have stood for centuries without the "maintenance" you are talking about. You are talking about upgrades, not maintenance. Adding gas and electricity are modern (< 150 years ago) things, as are earthquake codes, fire escapes, etc. I'm not suggesting people go live in cathedrals, but there's a huge hole in your reasoning.
- lexicality 5y agoEvery old church I've ever been in has had some kind of donation drive on the notice board asking for help replacing missing tiles, rotting roof beams etc. I don't know if the British were just exceptionally bad church builders and contemporary European churches are doing just fine but I would hazard a guess that no, they also require spectacularly large amounts of maintenance to keep the weather out too.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoTrue, but this is preventing a kind of decay that software is, by its digital nature, immune to. Information doesn't weather or rot. There's no software equivalent to "missing tiles" or "rotting roof beams".
- et1337 5y ago“Link rot” and “bit rot” are terms that have entered our common vocabulary. I think information gets weathered down by contact with humans, who are an incredible source of entropy.
- titzer 5y agoYes, this kind of upkeep is definitely required. Replacing little things as they break and keeping an eye out for issues. Old things require this upkeep, which is a different thing from rebuilding, replacing, or upgrading. But the goal of upkeep is to keep the thing in good shape, and usually without any visible change at all, rather than transforming it into something different (assumedly better, but not really). Upkeep is preservation, conservation. We've somehow forgotten how to do that for the vast majority of things.
- jart 5y agoThen consider NASA Voyager. It's been floating around the galaxy for 44 years. If all goes well, its onboard computer won't run out of power until October 10, 2166.
- stefanfisk 5y agoHell, here in Sweden there lots of old houses that are in dire shape BECAUSE they received “maintenance” to keep them modern, resulting in problems with mold and insects. The parallel to breaking working code while updating it to follows modern standards isn’t too far fetched.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoBoth here and in code, upgrading to keep up with progress of technology is good. Upgrading to keep up with progress of business - aka. ways to provide less value for more money - is bad. Old technology was often immune to value engineering simply because people didn't knew how to cut corners with it.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoIme, “upgrading to keep up with the progress of technology” is often code for “I haven’t learned the paradigm behind this legacy code base, but I know it’s bad”. I’ve spent so much time arguing against fad-driven development where people insist on rewriting year-old redux apps to use hooks because “hooks are the future”. At this point, I more or less reflexively oppose anyone who argues for a new technology just because it’s new.