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Ask Slashdot: A Development Environment Still Usable In 25 Years Time?
pev writes: I'm working on an embedded project that will need to be maintainable for the next 25 years. This raises the interesting question of how this can be best supported. The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years? Is anyone currently supporting software of a similar age that can share lessons learned from experience? Where do you choose to draw the line between handling likely issues and making things overly complicated?
Yeah, use something already outdated to make sure that no one evens remember it in 25 years.
If you're talking about IBM Mainframe stuff, then don't worry about it. IBM will support it in one way or another for the next 500 years because the systems that processes your airline reservations and processes your credit card transactions all still run on mainframes with COBOL code and CICS UIs. Nowadays they're dressed up with modern GUIs on top of it but ultimately it's all the same. Peek over at what the airline agent is looking at when she prints your ticket and you'll see a text console with lots of green and where you press CTRL to submit the form.
If you're talking about some modern unix or windows stuff, VMWare it now or something. In 25 years you'll have your quantum singularity computer with an emulator for GoogleOS 54 inside of which you can run an emulator for Windows 15 inside of which you can run an emulator for Windows 11 inside of which you can run VMWare Player with your stuff.
Better get started.
Since all code will be written in Apple's amazing revolutionary innovative new Swift language, just write it in that! It will be infinitely portable and recompileable for millennia!