Do you really want to? Your house probably didn't have electric lights when it was made. Your house probably didn't have telephone, much less cable TV wires, or ethernet. Note that wired telephone is a technology that came and went during the life of your house, today you may not care, but 50 years ago that would have been an issue. I'm not sure if your house would have had plumbing or not, even if it did the bathroom (singular - today most families want several) and kitchen were at best outdated. I have no doubt that your house has poor insulation. I suspect that your house has had several major renovations over the years, and the basic facts of the original structure limit what you can do and so it is still dated (though maybe in an endearing way)

I'm starting to think the Japanese have the right idea: build the house to last 20 years and rebuild often. Some parts of modern house design are fads that I hope to see die, but there are a lot of parts about modern houses that make them much better than old ones.

A single brick is more like a line of code than an application or library.

Applications are more like buildings which need to be maintained. Perhaps you could consider it a multi-use building with many tenants and sometimes under attack.

While not 120 years old, we have code in production that was written 30 years ago and runs just fine.

It will be replaced this year however, not because there's anything wrong with it besides code quality, but because it generates files for a system that'll be changed to something entirely different this year.

If the ground around your house physically changed completely every 5 years, then maybe you'd switch out bricks more often as well...

> Can we make software that's a little more like my bricks?

Excellent. This is a great analogy!

- Did the weather in your area change? Maybe you live in Texas and experienced an abnormally huge freeze in 2020 which cause most people to have to replace plumbing and water heaters?

- Maybe you are experiencing more hurricanes than normal and so flooding has become more likely. Now you need to put your house up on stilts?

- What about that new Tesla you might have bought that needs a 240v charger? Can you do this without ripping open the wall?

Software entropy is not just because the software changes, but because the environment changes.

- Did your neighborhood become a war zone?

That's easy. Just write software that doesn't do anything.

A little more related in my opinion is enterprise hardware. I recently started a new career managing software and hardware acquisitions, including their maintenance, for a very large organization. When OEM support and maintenance is required by policy, the EOL renders that associated hardware useless unless you're willing to maintain 3rd party maintenance. Which, from my understanding, even patches for vulns such as the recent log4 vuln would not be covered. One could argue that this limitation is created by such organizational policies, I guess, but it makes the whole industry look more like a leasing structure with purchase prices to me.

Everything has a lifetime. Individual bricks just have a pretty long one. Your building overall probably has a much, much shorter lifetime than you think, and likely has received updates and substantial maintenance over the decades, if anything at least to keep it up to code.

Maintenance is one way of extending the lifetime of things. Otherwise, your building would regularly be torn down and rebuilt. This is often the case, when maintenance is no longer enough. That's the best case scenario, too, as the worst case is it collapses of its own volition, potentially with you in it.

Everything has a lifetime: https://tildes.net/~talk/109v/thoughts_on_lifetimes_limits_a...

The bricks may be fine another couple of centuries or more. Brick walls eventually become piles of bricks if they are not maintained, though. How many times do you figure someone has done tuck pointing on the mortar in 12 decades?

Perhaps if you follow Unix philosophy, you can write such software.