Sadly, this doesn't match my experience. Software that isn't actively maintained always dies, sooner or later.
The last update to TeX (widely used in math and computer science for typesetting) was 12 January 2014.
A lot of payment processing systems are still running on code written in the 1960s and 1970s. Frequently untouched since Y2K.
I have a friend who went to work in the mid 2000s for a company she had worked for in the early 1970s. Out of curiosity she looked up her old programs. They were still running, unchanged. She asked why and was told, "They never broke."
One of the reasons for the survival of FORTRAN is that there are trusted software packages that people rely on which were written decades ago and still run.
There is an active emulator community for people who want to run games that are decades old, unchanged.
No, your old Netscape browser won't work in the modern web. Nor are early mobile apps going to run. But you'd be amazed at how many places you can find old software still happily running today.
The best "old" (30+ or 40+ years) code I worked on did this. The worst, which forced total rewrites, mingled everything together "for performance" but prevented the software from being easily ported to a new OS (Windows 3.1 hasn't been supported for a long time) or extended to support new capabilities.
But if you want to actually use it you'll install a much more recent distribution - probably texlive from 2020.
But the heart of it, TeX, is still the same old version.
Thank you for the most ludicrous comment that I've seen today. The popularity of TeX in academia is exactly because writing complex equations in popular word applications is painfully hard, and the typesetting is poor. By contrast writing them in TeX is easy and the typesetting defaults to excellent.
Talk to anyone who has to actually write many such equations. They will verify that it is not a question of "as easy". It is massively easier and better in TeX. Which is why academics working in math, physics and computer science overwhelmingly choose TeX.
Obviously depends on where along the learning curve, and preformed command line literacy, which on a venue like HN is always assumed to be native.
As a hypothetical, consider a Rip Van Winkle situation in which a mathematician wakes from a coma he's been in since the 1970s. Now force him to typeset one of his monographs. He'll do it in MS Word.
Actually not.
As a hypothetical, consider a Rip Van Winkle situation in which a mathematician wakes from a coma he's been in since the 1970s. Now force him to typeset one of his monographs. He'll do it in MS Word.
I have personal experience pertaining to this.
Before I was a programmer, I was a graduate student in mathematics. I wound up in the early 90s having never used Word or TeX and in a position where I needed to type up a paper. I began with Word, and before long I complained about how hard it was. A fellow grad student said I should learn how to do it in TeX.
It was literally faster, *on the very first paper that I tried to type*, to learn TeX and then type my paper in TeX than it was to try to do it in Word. The visual result was also massively better with TeX. Typesetting math formulas in Word is simply that bad.
I've tried to typeset some simple mathematics in Word since. The experience has not materially improved when it comes to typing real mathematics.
Based on this personal experience, I am quite confident that in the Rip Van Winkle situation that you describe, the mathematician will wind up doing it in TeX. And do it the same way that I did. Try Word because that seems easier. Ask a fellow mathematician when that proves to be a terrible experience. Be pointed at TeX and given a few tips. Discover that it is easier.
Actually they don't.
People preferred paying for products like https://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ which allowed people to type TeX into Microsoft documents than they did Equation Editor. Therefore Microsoft gave up on Equation Editor. They then created an XML-based markup language for math, and MathBuilder around that. Which they then put a TeX translation layer into so that you can type simple TeX in Word, Outlook, and so on, then get a math equation out.
Sadly for Microsoft, they didn't actually remove Equation Editor. I say sadly because they eventually had to. Per https://securityboulevard.com/2018/01/microsoft-kills-old-of... it was found to have a serious security hole, and removing it was easier than fixing it.
Incidentally, despite having both TeX and MathML available to look at, Microsoft failed to turn out something as good as TeX for serious use. As a result most journals will not accept documents produced using Math Builder.
So the aggregate opinion of the market is in. TeX was better than MS Equation Editor. (Which is why TeX outlived MS Equation Editor.)
How you managed to conclude LaTeX entry is now more popular than whatever quasi-wysiwig method MS Word currently supports is, I suppose, market information I'm not privy to.
I'm running the final release of Winamp as I type this. I organize my hard disk with the 1.0 of Spacemonger, which was free before it went paid. I edit audio files with Sound Forge 11 (up to 14 or so now) and before that I had a pirated copy of 6.0 that worked pretty well. I have a 'programs' folder full of stuff that runs without installation, some of which hasn't been touched in 5 or 10 years, and everything still runs when I try it.
Code is eternal.
Especially win32 apps, thanks both to windows and wine
> Even if the project is 'dead' it still runs, particularly on Windows.
For software I want to run long term, I always get the win32 version.
I personally hold the opinion that if the project is not being maintained, giving away the source code allows someone else to pick it up.
A snapshot of source code can be useful as a basis for some other project. However, you're also correct that, if the source code is abandonware and you/others have no interest in maintaining it, it almost certainly becomes less useful over time and at some point just breaks.
The thing at threat was the thing the team was using to maintain it, so that's what people were concerned about.
You don't care more about your garage than your house just because you're crying about your garage when a tornado wrecks it but not your house.
The reason I'm asking, while I was writing the article, I was considering including the youtube-dl fiasco (when the RIAA took it down from GitHub) as an example. People were concerned not because the code was gone (lots of mirrors popped up quickly), but because they were worried that the contributors would stop further development.
I think that's another indicator that the code itself carries little value. However, the problem space you've loaded and mapped to code in your own head, does have lots of value. Of course the fact that you're sharing it with the world in the best format we know so far (code) for free is much appreciated :)