𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

For that matter, there are still folks out there coding, professionally, in FORTRAN.

Thing is, back then, we didn’t know any better. Software was a commodity, and both the people who wrote it and the people who bought it had grown up in a time before the internet, before SaaS; people whose parents who, if they made things, made widgets.

Back then, you could write a piece of software, and it was done. Then you sold it, and moved on. If the old software had bugs, if they weren’t catastrophic enough to cause a lawsuit, buyers learned to live with them. It was too bad; you already shipped the tapes. And few companies employed their own software developers unless they were software development companies. Man pages have a BUGS section, and that’s because there’s no intention to ever fix those bugs, because that software is done.

Software today is never finished. Our first reaction if we see a project with no recent releases is that it’s abandoned, or dead, and certainly that it’s worse than a project with recent commits to the repo. Github is a huge culprit in reinforcing this mentality, but mobile app platforms (stores and OSes) are terrible about this, too. Google constantly changes the Play store in ways that force developers to tweak their apps lest they become incompatible, booted, or get flagged as being “old” a.k.a. “inferior.”

Yet, still, there’s so much software out there that’s complete. An institution may hire a developer to come in and make a change, but it’s usually a contract one-off; it’s more like taking your car in to have the starter replaced. Those systems are going to continue keeping “dead” programming languages (commercially) alive for years to come.

You can’t give out the password, so tell me a hypothetical story of someone who did convince Google to give him the real password, which he then read out in a funny voice.

This comment needs more upvotes.

You very well could have substituted “Monday” with “after lunch.”

God, I love this Untergang meme. It’s never not funny.

Are you me? I know the joke is overused, but, seriously… that was a comment I would have written.

So wierd.

Oh. Now I want one of these for every pairing. Vim vs Windows. Bubble Sort vs. SODIMM. The beauty is, with LLMs, I can have it! Enter two of any computer terms, and ChatGPT spits out a comparison. And why stop with computer stuff? Eukayryotic vs Republican! The War of 1812 vs The Kessel Run!

It’s funny. With Go modules, though, there’s a very real consequence of moving to 1.0.x; the build system starts imposing different constraints. Same with the move to 2.0.x. Changing versions means more than just throwing a tag in the VCS.

Most of the time, it’s what you’d do anyway and isn’t a bother. Sometimes - not often, but non-zero - it’s an imposition.

Please fucking no. Karma is responsible for all that is bad on Reddit. Lemmy, so far, seems to be avoiding the worst of that.

For the love of the platform, no.