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You can. Package everything you need with the environment and you’re done. Now whether future versions of whatever container you choose to run it in will suppor

You can. Package everything you need with the environment and you’re done. Now whether future versions of whatever container you choose to run it in will support establishing the environment is a separate detail. There is no answer. You can go all the way to reserving an entire computer to run mission critical code but you don’t know if it is future proof in terms of electrical specifications. That’s the point of civilization though. You iterate and what works out, other people copy and iterate even more.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> You can go all the way to reserving an entire computer to run mission critical code but you don’t know if it is future proof in terms of electrical specifications. See, that's a beautiful example, just not in the direction that I think you intend it. I can, in fact, take an appliance that's a few decades old and plug it into a modern outlet and it'll work just fine. I do not, in fact, have to preserve an entire electrical grid just to run my application^w appliance, because the underlying infrastructure maintains compatibility.
- hnews_account_1 4y ago
  No it is an example exactly in the incorrect way that you took it. Just because electricity has been relatively constant in specification doesn’t mean it’ll always be the case. You can work with that assumption up to even a third or fourth order approximation. But on some level it’ll fail. Which brings you to the larger generalization that you haven’t grasped: the further down the stack you go, the more stable it is. Python is nearest the top layer. Hardware changes in decade cycles. Electricity likely in century cycles. Keep going. The laws of physics change never. Obv the time scales aren’t strictly logarithmic. Human ingenuity means we could find some exceptional electricity specification tomorrow and convert the whole world in one decade. But it is relatively rarer.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> You can go all the way to reserving an entire computer to run mission critical code but you don’t know if it is future proof in terms of electrical specifications. See, that's a beautiful example, just not in the direction that I think you intend it. I can, in fact, take an appliance that's a few decades old and plug it into a modern outlet and it'll work just fine. I do not, in fact, have to preserve an entire electrical grid just to run my application^w appliance, because the underlying infrastructure maintains compatibility.

hnews_account_1 4y ago
No it is an example exactly in the incorrect way that you took it. Just because electricity has been relatively constant in specification doesn’t mean it’ll always be the case. You can work with that assumption up to even a third or fourth order approximation. But on some level it’ll fail. Which brings you to the larger generalization that you haven’t grasped: the further down the stack you go, the more stable it is. Python is nearest the top layer. Hardware changes in decade cycles. Electricity likely in century cycles. Keep going. The laws of physics change never. Obv the time scales aren’t strictly logarithmic. Human ingenuity means we could find some exceptional electricity specification tomorrow and convert the whole world in one decade. But it is relatively rarer.