Dan Bricklin on Software That Lasts 200 Years

Lansdowne writes "Dan Bricklin, author of VisiCalc, has written a great new essay identifying a need for software that needs to last for decades or even centuries without replacement. Neither prepackaged nor custom-written software is fully able to meet the need, and he identifies how attributes of open source might help to produce long-lasting 'Societal Infrastructure Software'."

Comments

200 years???

[danormsby]

Any presidents set for this to show 200 years is a good target to aim for?

Must have had one hell of a beta test phase.

Re:200 years???

[nomadic]

I think 200 years isn't long enough. They just don't make software like they used to. For example, last time I visited Atlantis, and used the Amulet of Chr'Thalis to activate the ancient computers laying dormant beneath the Temple of the Dawn, they just started working perfectly. True, they only speak Ancient Atlantean, but the software's just fine. And we're talking about systems that haven't been maintained since the Temple Wardens vanished sometime during the Fourth Age; that's several hundred years at least since their last debugging. Of course, some of the hardware's a bit run-down (in the case of some the Temple traps that's a good thing), and the Orb of Kings is still inactive, but the Temple software works perfectly.

Re:200 years???

[Ours]

Wait untill the secret service starts asking you questions about shooting presidents ;-).

Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like most open source has been less than 1.0 for at least 200 years. But all for a quality product right? Oh you found a bug? Well thats because its pre-1.0!

Re:Work on the hardware first.

[Keruo]

we have the hardware, paper and pen only problem is that the software, human generally dies of old age around 70-100 years I haven't yet seen custom-written software from this field, but some re-packaged with silicone enhancemets did catch my eye

Hypothetical question...

[BladeMelbourne]

I wonder if there will still be holes/bugs in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 SP1 in 2204?

Now excuse me while I get back to writing my "Hello World" application that will last two centuries :-)

Re:Hypothetical question...

[OldManAndTheC]

Now excuse me while I get back to writing my "Hello World" application that will last two centuries :-)

Unfortunately, in 200 years the language will have evolved, and the words and phrases we use today will have completely different meanings. People of the future will understand "Hello World" to mean "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", and believing your program to be a dire threat, they will fire up their time machine and send back Arnold Schwarzenegger's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson to eliminate you before you can even write it...

2 letters

[News for nerds]

vi

Re:5 letters

[DungeonCoder]

Emacs is better

(mod +5 funny, remember, this is /. :))

long-term.. short-term

[Janek Kozicki]

hey, all this babbling about long-term and short-term reminds me of xterm. Soon xterm will be 200 years old. Or at least sooner than almost anything else. (except for getty ;)

Ask the programmers at Duke Nukem Forever

[davejenkins]

Those Duke Nukem guys should have this problem pegged by now...

Re:Standards, not Software

[B2382F29]

Aren't you a little bit optimistic about HURD being available in just 200 Years?

Survival?

[Dr. q00p]

I think there was a /. post some time ago (that I cannot seem to locate right now) that talked about the freeware paradox: The better freeware becomes the less you make on support.

So, in order to survive I guess you have to make shitty sw and do lots of marketing to sell your products anyway.

Hmm, sounds familiar in some way...

Re:Work on the hardware first.

[foobsr]

re-packaged with silicone enhancemets did catch my eye

Please explain !

CC.

Re:Already there?

[njcoder]

" Remember Y2K? Did anyone notice that the world didn't come crashing down on Jan. 1, 2000?"

You mean it's safe to come out of my bunker? Thank God! I'm sick of sustaining myself on spam, twinkies and tang.

Re:now history depending on electricity

[dabigpaybackski]

**The project we worked on was recorded onto a (state-of-the-art) laserdisc so it would "last through the generations". Last year I read an article saying that dedicated enthusiasts were desperately trying to assemble a working laserdisc system, in order to archive all the data collected just 20 years earlier.** So what's the problem? As long as they included instructions on the laserdisk as to how to build a laserdisk player then they could just...oh. Maybe I should sleep.

Re:5 letters

[the real darkskye]

No vi is correct, the article is about software, not operating systems! :D

Re:200 years of speech recognition software???

[Arminator]

See, this happens when you use 200 year old speech recognition software...

Understanding the problem?

[oneiros27]

During that same project I was complaining about, we finally found out why the director of our department wanted to make the change -- and it was because of a misconception about the front end, which wasn't directly tied to the back end, and could've been changed out without doing nearly as much work.

That's not to say that the change wasn't needed, as it was, because of other problems, which we started discovering during the course of the project, but then again, they never should've gone to the software they were running in the first place, as it didn't have a benefit/cost ratio better than the software they were on originally.

Of course, we also went through 4 different PMs on the project, had 'co-project managers' at one point, and I'd get bitched at for bringing up flaws in the project plan, even though I had been told in the first meeting that I was the technical oversight, and if something went wrong, it'd be my fault.

From my experience, a good project comes when the programmers know what the goals and objectives of the organization are, and are then told what their constraints are (budget, time, etc), to make it happen. It rarely comes when the higher level mangers decide on the solution, and then tell you how you have to build it. For some reason, I got yelled at after putting up the following sign in my cubicle:

"We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management
could ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs."
-- Mike Andrews in alt.sysadmin.recovery 10 October 2000
<eUJE5.880$ln6.119642@news.flash.net>

I Know of Code That Will Last 200 Years

[ausoleil]

In C:

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
for(;;)
{
printf ("Hello World!\n");
}
}

We already have that

[aristus]

217 years and counting.... of course, it's had 27 patches applied to it.

Bricklin Is Clueless

[Master of Transhuman]

if he thinks ANY software could last a century or more. Or even SHOULD so last.

HUMANS won't last through this century! How does he expect software to do so?

Re:Long Now Foundation

[Jesus_666]

I wouldn't trust a long Now that can't be cast into an int Now.