Spyke
fedia.io

If you're talking about applications that can be made to act how their namesake predecessors did 30 years ago, sure. The Unix mindset is all about that.

But don't be fooled into thinking that anything on a modern Unix-like system hasn't been modified, patched or rewritten from scratch at some point in the last 30 years. More than once. Even /bin/false has a changelog.

103
dohpaz42reply
lemmy.world

Slightly pedantic, but according to core-utils GitHub, false.c has not been changed in 21 years. But true.c, which is what false.c is based on, has been changed as recent as 4 months ago.

I couldn’t resist looking it up, and found the results mildly interesting.

84

Most changes are updating the copyright year.
After that, it's pretty much (or maybe completely, I haven't checked exhaustively) for the --help and --version flags, not for the core part of exiting with a certain exit code.

4

It is committed long-term maintenance that separates a road from a desire pathway.

It is committed long-term maintenance that eventually makes software solid enough to be someone else's substrate.

/bombast

5
lemmy.world

yeah, I bet there was a bunch of crap written 30y ago too, the difference was no npm or github

38
Lifterreply
discuss.tchncs.de

Not quite 30 yet but maven was released 2004 and still going strong.

13
AAA
feddit.org

Survivorship bias. We only see the "good old programs" because the bad ones didn't make it until now.

40
Stitch0815reply
feddit.org

Yes

And while not exactly applicable for the computer example but generally everytime this example is brought up

ROMANS DID NOT HAVE 40 FUCKING TON TRUCKS

Much less so 100s per hour

Roman infrastructure was/is impressive no doubt

But not that impressive

19
mkwtreply
lemmy.world

Yeah, the damage curve is exponential by axle weight.

2
1984reply
lemmy.today

Sure, but we have been running the same Linux command line tools now for the 30 years ive been on Linux. None of them have had any noticable bugs and none of them have been replaced, until maybe now recently with some rust versions that are still not default.

They are incredibly actually. We dont have that in software engineering anymore. We add features and bloat to all modern software until it needs to be replaced.

8

Kind of sad isn't it? I had some lengthy discussions with someone who worked for Atari in the 70s/80s and the amount of magic they worked with limited hardware was something else.. Sadly I was a young drunk and don't remember much of what he said.

6

Nah. The dumpster fire known as gcc still survived until this day.

There's a reason why almost every new optimization/language starts with llvm.

7
marcosreply
lemmy.world

What are you guys doing to your JS packages for them to last so long?

24
lemmy.world

That Roman road is in absolute shit condition. It used to have 2 more layers on top of those rocks, a gravel layer and a stone block finish.

25
Soapboxreply
lemmy.zip

That Roman road also didn't have thousands of multi-ton vehicles rolling over it every day.

15

Yeah, so not ideal, but still workable despite being built off ancient technology in an ancient time.

9
lemmy.zip

Who spilled the 55 gallon drum of sulfuric acid out front, and "forgot" to clean it up?

14
lemmy.zip

I suppose there was a big fire. Sulfuric acid would have eaten the steel reinforcement, leaving the asphalt alone, more or less.

2

I watched whole videos about repaving with used bricks and why we don't do that for all low-speed roads globally is just beyond me.

10

Yeah accurate. I got a few node projects and more rust projects. The few node projects get more security vulnerability than the rust ones. And most time it's just OpenSSL and rustls, which is kinda expected from such important packages

5

You reached the end