Comment by gpm
4 years ago
Youtube-dl is an app chasing a moving operating of trying to interact with other sites APIs... many of which don't really even want to let youtube-dl do that. Most apps aren't in such a difficult space and keep working basically forever.
> Most apps aren't in such a difficult space and keep working basically forever.
Sadly, this doesn't match my experience. Software that isn't actively maintained always dies, sooner or later.
Whether this is true depends on what you do.
The last update to TeX (widely used in math and computer science for typesetting) was 12 January 2014.
A lot of payment processing systems are still running on code written in the 1960s and 1970s. Frequently untouched since Y2K.
I have a friend who went to work in the mid 2000s for a company she had worked for in the early 1970s. Out of curiosity she looked up her old programs. They were still running, unchanged. She asked why and was told, "They never broke."
One of the reasons for the survival of FORTRAN is that there are trusted software packages that people rely on which were written decades ago and still run.
There is an active emulator community for people who want to run games that are decades old, unchanged.
No, your old Netscape browser won't work in the modern web. Nor are early mobile apps going to run. But you'd be amazed at how many places you can find old software still happily running today.
Good modular design is helpful here. Properly segregating responsibilities means that portions of your code base can become "finished", while other portions remain in near constant flux. For an emulator, for example, if you separate the rendering from the hardware emulation portion, you can leave the hardware emulation portion untouched for years at a time while changing just the rendering code to port to new platforms.
The best "old" (30+ or 40+ years) code I worked on did this. The worst, which forced total rewrites, mingled everything together "for performance" but prevented the software from being easily ported to a new OS (Windows 3.1 hasn't been supported for a long time) or extended to support new capabilities.
> The last update to TeX (widely used in math and computer science for typesetting) was 12 January 2014.
But if you want to actually use it you'll install a much more recent distribution - probably texlive from 2020.
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Even if the project is 'dead' it still runs, particularly on Windows.
I'm running the final release of Winamp as I type this. I organize my hard disk with the 1.0 of Spacemonger, which was free before it went paid. I edit audio files with Sound Forge 11 (up to 14 or so now) and before that I had a pirated copy of 6.0 that worked pretty well. I have a 'programs' folder full of stuff that runs without installation, some of which hasn't been touched in 5 or 10 years, and everything still runs when I try it.
Code is eternal.
> Code is eternal.
Especially win32 apps, thanks both to windows and wine
> Even if the project is 'dead' it still runs, particularly on Windows.
For software I want to run long term, I always get the win32 version.
You are my software twin. I'm using Winamp 2.95 this very moment, and Spacemonger 1.0 which still works fantastically. Both have slight crashes in rare edge cases now but perfectly usable day-to-day. You wouldn't perchance also be using an old version of UltraEdit before the heavy focus on subscriptions?
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AutoDock Vina[0] is one of the most popular molecular-docking softwares used (if we go by papers citing it). It was last updated on May 11, 2011.
I personally hold the opinion that if the project is not being maintained, giving away the source code allows someone else to pick it up.
[0] http://vina.scripps.edu/download.html