this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Survivorship bias. We only see the "good old programs" because the bad ones didn't make it until now.
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
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.
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.
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.
Good point. Same thing with music for example.