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> your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. That sentence did not end the way I ex
by quietbritishjim 2y ago
> your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior.
That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start.
Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.
- dwattttt 2y agoThe potential problem though is that the surviving standard may have been the best for a reason that's no longer relevant. There are certainly decisions that have been made over the last 30 years that don't make sense in light of today's storage/power/ubiquity-of-connection that are just incumbent now.
- inglor_cz 2y agoFor example, the inherent unsafety of many C operations and a long list of undefined behaviors in the language, which was meant to improve compile times on long forgotten processors whose performance would no longer suffice to manage a LED lightbulb. At least we can slowly displace C with other languages, but those limitations were already obsolete in the early 1990s, and we are still wading through countless CVEs caused by them.