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As a technologist I'm always excited about new stuff, but there's another part of me that thinks it's really neat that some of the world's most important softwa
by breckinloggins 14y ago
As a technologist I'm always excited about new stuff, but there's another part of me that thinks it's really neat that some of the world's most important software was written 30 - 50 years ago and still works just fine.
Can you imagine a time 1000 years into the future where software written today might still be in use? How cool would that be?!
- wazoox 14y agoI'm currently reading a book written in the 1170s, so I can imagine that :)
- arethuza 14y agoAnd I've just finished the Iliad (in translation) which dates from about 800BC describing events of ~1250BC. It's a bit like the descendants thing that was discussed a few days ago on here - either lots of stuff will survive the next 1000 years (and therefore lots of running code will) or almost nothing will.
- yxhuvud 14y agoCool? I'd think that would be depressing.
- Nerdfest 14y agoMost of that software is still in use because it's very poorly written using a combination of COBOL and assembler and people are afraid to touch it.
- glhaynes 14y agoVery poorly written and it works, at least.
- pnathan 14y agoThere are some technologies out there in the non-mainframe world that have similar properties. To name the ones I know of - vi, emacs, C, Common Lisp. These have held pretty steady for about 30 years now.
- dedward 14y agoGiven I'm sure many people here have anecdotes about little snippets they wrote in a short amount of time that ended up in use for a decades, even though the code was crappy (someone tell me I'm not alone here...) - I'd be willing to bet something, somewhere will still be around a long time from now.. though a thousand years is a bit hard to comprehend in terms of technological change. If banks still exist they'll still be emulating zOS on their quantum dimension-folded computers...