Comment by apitman
20 days ago
In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin it up in 2050 without major work.
One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.
> That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model.
Not all software now is SaaS, but unfortunately it is too common now.
> But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies.
Some people (including myself) prefer to write programs without too many dependencies, in order to avoid that problem. Other things also help, including some people write programs for older systems which can be emulated, or will use a more simpler portable C code, etc. There are things that can be done, to avoid too many dependencies.
There is uxn, which is a simple enough instruction set that people can probably implement it without too much difficulty. Although some programs might need some extensions, and some might use file names, etc, many programs will work, because it is designed in a simple way that it will work.
Big uxn fan
I’m not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what you’re saying.
A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of std.
All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't think any of my Go code will survive long term.
I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler.
Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.
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