Comment by btilly
4 years ago
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.
Yes. You'll install a bunch of recent stuff around it.
But the heart of it, TeX, is still the same old version.
I think that's playing with semantics. Most codebases have old parts, the old part of texlive just has a name. It's still being actively maintained and would be a lot less usable if it wasn't, there's just an imaginary line between the texlive part and the tex part.
Old version? You have to understand that some applications need innovation based on new ideas. TeX is only popular in the academic and publishing world, not like a web browser. Can we write a complex equation in TeX as easy as we write in popular word applications like MS Word?
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