Development quotes of the week

Howdy there, fellow cyber denizens; 'tis I, Alyssa Rosenzweig, your friendly local biological life form! I'm a certified goofball, licensed to be silly under the GPLv3, but more importantly, I'm passionate about free software's role in society. I'm excited to join the Free Software Foundation as an intern this summer to expand my understanding of our movement. Well, that, and purchasing my first propeller beanie in strict compliance with the FSF office dress code!

You know that Perl has you when you start looking for admin tasks to automate with it. Tasks that don't need automating and that would be much, much faster if you performed them by hand. When you start scouring the web for three- or four-character commands that, when executed, alphabetise, spell-check, and decrypt three separate files in parallel and output them to STDERR, ROT13ed.

Satellites may seem an extreme case, but the same goes for any large scientific studies and many things in the aerospace industry. You can still find inflight TV systems on major plane lines that will reboot themselves to some Red Hat Linux 7 logo.. an OS that was EOL over a decade ago. There are similar items in industrial controllers for making textiles, plastics, and other items.. the devices are large and expensive to replace so will run whatever software was in them for decades. They will also require software which interfaces with them to be 'locked' in place which can have a pile on effect where you find that you need to have some new computer system be able to run something written in Python 1.5.

I expect that a LOT of systems are currently written to work only with Python 2.7 and will be wanting software for it until the late 2030's. The problem is that very few of them are have plans or ability to pay for that maintenance support. While it is very late in the game, I would say that if you are relying on python for such a project, you need to start budgeting your 2020 and future budgets to take in account of paying some group to support those libraries somehow.