'We’ve been writing software for hardly more than half a century, and I suspect that the vast majority of lines of code in existence were written since 2000. What will the world look like when we’ve had software for as long as we’ve had the printing press? What about when we’ve had computer languages for as long as we’ve had spoken languages? How are we going to perform refactoring on a code base of a hundred billion lines? Vernor Vinge envisions professional programmer-archaeologists whose job it is to deal with these systems; I’m not sure we’re that far off from needing these people now.'
Sometimes, when I go back to code I've written, I feel a bit like the Talosians or other stereotypical aliens who have "advanced" to a point that they don't know how to repair their ancient machinery …
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Embedded in Academia : When Software Ages Badly
In some respects, software ages gracefully: it generally starts out working poorly but gets better over time as bugs are fixed. Unlike hardware, there’s no physical wearing out of parts. This post is …
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