Survivorship bias. We only see the "good old programs" because the bad ones didn't make it until now.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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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.
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.
That Roman road also didn't have thousands of multi-ton vehicles rolling over it every day.
That javascript hole was probably caused by a bicycle.
Looks like a user error to me
Yeah, so not ideal, but still workable despite being built off ancient technology in an ancient time.
Until Y2K38 😱😱😱
time_t is in libc headers, just rebuild and good to go
Survivorship bias
yeah, I bet there was a bunch of crap written 30y ago too, the difference was no npm or github
Not quite 30 yet but maven was released 2004 and still going strong.
Thanks. Now i feel old :(
30 months!??!? Are you trying to get hacked?
COBOL system written 50 years ago...JS package at release.
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.
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
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.
#define AUTHORS proper_name ("Jim Meyering")
The true author, so to speak.
you mispelled super interesting
You misspelled misspell 🤪
Software quality apocalypse continues to worse ( the bar was already low )
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
Who spilled the 55 gallon drum of sulfuric acid out front, and "forgot" to clean it up?
I suppose there was a big fire. Sulfuric acid would have eaten the steel reinforcement, leaving the asphalt alone, more or less.
*30 days
What are you guys doing to your JS packages for them to last so long?
No using in production, I guess
Really, that's some well-crafted street.
I'm an old-school JavaScript developer, that's why I use Angular!
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.
sudo-rs
We should dig up our roads to use as fuel while we're at it
The only time climate change is helping us with that, by heating up the air so much the asphalt melts.