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Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by angersock on Friday July 29, 2016 @02:21PM (#12188791)
Somewhat darkly--is any of the software we write going to still be useful in 80 years?

Terrible devices with awful intent, but they do still work.

Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by ansible on Friday July 29, 2016 @03:11PM (#12189191)
Terrible devices with awful intent, but they do still work.

Technically, the shells being found now are the buggy ones, that didn't explode when they were supposed to.

Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by munificent on Friday July 29, 2016 @03:39PM (#12189393)
The worst-written software always lives the longest. Maintainable, modular software, by definition, is easy to change and swap out. So the evolutionary forces favor awful spaghetti codebases that everyone is too afraid to touch.
Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by Florin_Andrei on Friday July 29, 2016 @04:20PM (#12189675)
So then the solution would be true natural selection and self-evolving software. As long as external entities (programmers) are tasked with killing off the unfit code, selection is going to be pretty bad.
Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by UlyssesSKrunk on Sunday July 31, 2016 @04:37PM (#12198714)
Nah, they weren't buggy, it was just user error. Nobody stepped on them properly.
Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by gkya on Friday July 29, 2016 @05:27PM (#12190147)
I can say that emacs will survive till the end of the keyboard era. It's not tied to any OS, it's portable and is a general purpose programmable programmer's tool. It's the archetype of long living software already.
Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by ptaipale on Friday July 29, 2016 @03:04PM (#12189132)
Most likely some military control systems will live much longer than the designers thought...
Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by dmitrygr on Friday July 29, 2016 @03:08PM (#12189162)
DMV's systems (given their speed) are from 80 years ago
Re:After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and... by jharger on Friday July 29, 2016 @03:58PM (#12189506)
So that's a scary thought... but what's an even scarier thought is that they were probably made pretty recently.