Development quotes of the week

Posted Aug 19, 2020 22:57 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: Development quotes of the week by mathstuf
Parent article: Development quotes of the week

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.