Comment by jl6

15 hours ago

> How does someone write software that needs to run for ~50 years where the hardware will need to be replaced with non-equivalent, newer hardware?

Some ideas:

Write it in a popular language/ecosystem, stick rigidly to well-defined APIs, use commodity hardware, flatten out any malignant cleverness, maintain documentation on why every part does the thing it does, and make the source code readily available.

This is based on working with some very old systems, and each point above is the opposite of something that made life harder.

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jl6

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inopinatus  12 hours ago

Unfortunately, “popular language/ecosystem” includes JavaScript and PHP.

I’d go for “universal and timeless”, which has meant C for several decades now. There is, I’d concede, a reasonable chance that Rust obtains that label in our lifetimes.

  • very-old-sw  1 hour ago

    My C programs from a few decades ago, before namespaces were invented, no longer compile. However, the old executables still execute. The old C compilers are available but not supported; ChatGPT warns to expect trouble. Perhaps maybe there are compatibility switches that work correctly. Using them would require changing the makefiles.

  • asa400  8 hours ago

    Yeah agreed. Popular is a good first approximation, but to be more precise I think you want tools where the incentives in the community reward stability over features that require breakage, which would include languages and runtimes like Erlang and Clojure.

    Neither is popular when compared to for example Python or PHP, but they both have cultures that care about stability in the core runtime and the libraries. Most folks probably don’t know that about Erlang and maybe think it’s some new whiz-bang thing, but Erlang is incredibly stable and well supported by a dedicated team that has been doing it for years and years at this point. I don’t know if Erlang will be more or less popular in 20 years but it 100% will be around and be receiving updates, I would put money on it.