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Immortal Code
ziani writes ""... Sometimes a piece of code is so elegant, so evolved, that it outlasts everything else." Nice article at Wired wondering how much great (and lousy) code is lost due to business failures."
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What other basic code pieces, used in hundreds or thousands of programs, do you know?
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I'm always curious as to what may be some of the oldest "working" code that's publicly available. Code that was written ages ago, but still used today.
I'm sure that there are other examples, but I'd like to put forward the first candidate of such code: Squeak Smalltalk.
The reason I put it forward is more because of my knowledge with it. Of course, I may be wrong also, but...
Anyway, the first time I saw the predecessor to Squeak was back at an Apple sponsored event at college in 1985. They were showing off the Macs and new Mac Plus.
One fellow there managed to have a copy of the original Smalltalk-80 image that Apple worked on with Xerox. It was a fascinating piece of software.
That image was sourced from the original work done at Xerox in the late '70s and early '80s.
When they decided to bring forth Squeak, they started with the original Apple image (which started with the original Xerox image).
So, I'd like to think, though I don't know, that there are lines of code within that Squeak image that literally date back to the late '70s and have never been changed since. Coded late at night by some hacker at Xerox and simply pulled along with the Smalltalk image, never needing to be tweaked.
No doubt there are the zillions of line of code still kicking and screaming within industry, but I'm more interested with code that is out in the wild, and still being used somewhat actively.
Any other contenders?
That article talks of Baker using statistical probability towards speech recognition.
That immediately makes me thing of the markov matrix/chain.
The two ways I would have looked at speech without having read anything on it would be FFT and neural nets, and/or markov matricies (likely also with fft).
When I first learned to use them in speech generation (either written or spoken) and also general analysis that became my favorite tool to abuse (my hammer making everything look like a nail?).
I immediately thought of how I could use them in image recognition, game ai, and stock analysis...
But mostly I used them to post to newsgroups and web discussion boards and then laughed at people responding to them as if they were regular users and usually fighting with them.
I wrote a Poe generator (would write stories/poems based on his matrix) and also a radiohead song generator.
Now my current hammer(s) are neural nets and genetic algorithms - but the markov matrix is stuff fun as all hell.
It never says straight out in the article that Baker uses those - but the general concept that is discussed seems to point at them.
(and yeah - I know the article was about losing code - but that's boring - what is cool is the code discussed)
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I'd bet that most if not all coders get themself copies of their code and keep it in their own portfolio to reuse and recycle it.
I worked for a dot-bomb, and a company that is still around. I erased all of it. Not for security or copyright issues, but becuase there wasn't anything of use.
Most of the broad purpose code was like re-writing CVS (yes I'm not kidding), or gnu-E. One of my qualms in working for those companies was their hush-hush secretive attitude. And when you get past to find out what the secret is, its like "your doing that? Why not just use this GPL code right here?"
I realize my experience might be out of the ordinary, but I got rid of it just becuase I had no use for it.
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