Development quotes of the week

Posted Aug 17, 2020 13:38 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Development quotes of the week by willy
Parent article: Development quotes of the week

In general, yes, I agree. However, in specific instances, removing old behaviors which have no good use case (and trivial replacements) can be justified. Plus, even if the standard removes it, doesn't mean that in practice it is actually gone because implementations usually have even higher guarantees.

As another example, even the kernel will remove old, bad, or insecure interfaces at times. Sure, it takes just a single (hopefully involved) user to say "I was using that" to have a strong argument for restoration, but I've not seen (or looked for) anyone screaming that `gets` is gone. Though if it gets them to port away from C in anger…maybe their project will just be better for it anyways ;) .

On a somewhat related note, I actually find it an interesting phenomenon that we're creating with expiration of things like digital signatures and the like. We have these really old programs which don't/can't/won't change written decades ago. But in 10 years, things from today are likely to have expired mechanisms surrounding them. So eventually we could be in a situation where running a century-old binary will be easier than running a 40-year-old binary because the latter cares about the date either to run or to communicate with the world[1]. So removing interfaces that were introduced later may actually be easier because "no one" would be able to run any software that was made while the interface in question was available and recommended (the best/easiest solution would likely to find a contemporary version of the platform rather than try and run it on a modern version).

[1]Sure, time namespaces are looking to be a thing, but that doesn't help my TOTP generator or TLS-using program from communicating with the world.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Aug 19, 2020 22:57 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 years ago? Black hole of fad frameworks and brittle dependencies. Computer Archaeology is going to become a full-time job.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Aug 20, 2020 23:38 UTC (Thu) by rietta (guest, #133698) [Link] (1 responses)

I really find this perspective intriguing. 1980 to 2005 was the golden age of standalone software. Get the emulation right and you can run it. 2006 to 2020 is the age of SaaS, meaning that the life expectancy of the software is the period of time its financially beneficial to the original developer to provide an ongoing service. This even applies to open source, where maintainers loose interest and leave. It's not reasonable to expect an entire graph of dependencies to remain stable for the long term.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Aug 21, 2020 1:00 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

That's not so different from hardware. Given full blueprints, you can reasonably rebuild any machine from 19-th century from scratch, no matter how complicated. Even if you start from raw materials.

It's not feasible anymore. You won't be able to just take Apollo project blueprints and build your own rocket. You'll likely find that there are no modern alloys that perfectly replace the ones used back then, that some substances might be banned entirely (e.g. carbon tet fire extinguishers or PCBs in transformers), or that some tools are no longer produced.

The solution here is to move forward and standardize ever larger components, so it would be easier to keep them working. E.g. HTML for UI description is becoming such a standard.