Happy New Year from SpamAssassin [LWN.net]

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 2:05 UTC (Sun) by jordanb (guest, #45668)
In reply to: Happy New Year from SpamAssassin by Cyberax
Parent article: Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Considering that we ended up having very few problems with Y2K, it seems like the 1980s assessment was correct. The Y2K problem was successfully dealt with in the 1990s and caused no major disruptions.

Although it did show just how crappy many perl programs are.

BTW, to all Perl programmers out there: Happy new year, 19110!

to post comments

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 4:14 UTC (Sun) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

It could be argued that the only reason Y2K didn't cause a computer metldown is so many people ran around screaming that it was going to cause a meltdown along with all the people who tried to capitalize on those people by selling guns, food, generators and other "end of civilization" products. It's interesting to consider that had there not been so much publicity and the end of the world crowd not gotten involved that the y2k bug would have resulted in serious problems although certainly not the end of the world.

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 5:33 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Exactly. Y2K wasn't a problem because billions were spent fixing all of the software systems before it happened. Without those fixes (and many of the bugs that were fixed would have been catastrophic), the software simply wouldn't have worked, and we would have had a huge mess.

Also, if it weren't for all of this investment, the dot-com bubble would have exploded a couple of years earlier. Thanks to all that dot-com spending, we didn't see a tech collapse until spring of 2000.

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 9:22 UTC (Sun) by cventers (guest, #31465) [Link] (1 responses)

> BTW, to all Perl programmers out there: Happy new year, 19110!

Ah, but you see, any Perl program that erroneously string-concatenates the
year would have already been rendered broken at the turn of the
millennium (19100).

Or perhaps my sarcasm detector is broken :p

Happy New Year from SpamAssassin

Posted Jan 3, 2010 10:34 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I think that the point was that some software sucks so badly that it's been
broken for 10 years and has not been fixed yet!