@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Heh, this might be my favorite image ever:

So yeah, I’m not gonna defend PHP. I honestly agree that it is not a good language. I guess I’m part of the problem though because I continue using it though. :P

Hmm… Maybe I should reiterate my point. Perhaps it is the case that old software simply doesn’t go away, for better or for worse. Hardware breaks down and eventually you have to throw it away and upgrade. Old software can be patched and kept alive almost indefinitely as long as someone out there is willing to do it.

Luke Maciak wrote:
I have a bluetooth keyboard so that I can use Vim on my iPad… Well, not on the iPad itself, but when I use the iPad to ssh into my linux box. Believe it or not, these things make for a pretty decent thin client – the form factor, weight and battery capacity just can’t be beat.

of course they can… my Toshiba ac100 does exactly this! AND you can use it on your lap or while standing without needing 5 hands. But that wasn’t my point. My point was: If you have no keyboard, then the UI of vi/vim makes no sense at all. Yes you can add a keyboard to your system to make up for that, but most people wont.
Luke Maciak wrote:
I can’t really see the Linux Kernel being ported to any other language while he is at the helm.

I don’t see any big project ported to an entirely different language soon. But that Banks still use cobol for legacy-reasons doesnt make me want to use cobol for my next project.

Luke Maciak wrote:
PHP is pretty crappy, but some of the most successful web projects are written in it (Facebook, WordPress, Joomla, Durpal, etc..)

aka “let’s eat shit… millions of flies can’t be wrong”
I won’t even go into discussing the quality of most PHP-Projects… (i’m looking at you WordPress, Typo3, MediaWiki, …). Let’s just say:
PHP is wrong and should not be used!

PS: i had links behind most single words of that last line, to some anti-php-rants. Since your spamfilter stops me from using too much links, here is the code as it was (and Links as Comment)

@ Nicolas:

I think that significant factor in the apparent slowing down of Moore’s law was the big changes in the video game market that were caused by the exceptionally long lifetime of current gen consoles. Since the console hardware became stagnant, and major publishers couldn’t afford to ignore it they stopped pushing the PC hardware to its limits. So the growth slowed down a bit, at the consumer market. The PC vendors simply concentrated on selling somewhat dated hardware at the “top of the line” prices because they could get away with it, as the new games were no longer as resource intensive. But I believe that Moore’s law is still holding, at least for the most part.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Very good point. Source control is a great example here – we have come a long way and for most modern projects CVS is no longer an adequate tool. We have new paradigms such as distributed source control with great implementations such as git and Mercurial.

So yeah, very often software simply becomes obsolete because we end up with new paradigms, new philosophies and new ways of doing things that make the old stuff irrelevant.

As for the other points…

I have a bluetooth keyboard so that I can use Vim on my iPad… Well, not on the iPad itself, but when I use the iPad to ssh into my linux box. Believe it or not, these things make for a pretty decent thin client – the form factor, weight and battery capacity just can’t be beat.

C will probably be around at least as long as Linus is around. I can’t really see the Linux Kernel being ported to any other language while he is at the helm. And with the Kernel being a C project there will always be a large ecosystem of C based code clustered around it in terms of modules, applications and etc…

PHP is pretty crappy, but some of the most successful web projects are written in it (Facebook, WordPress, Joomla, Durpal, etc..) so it will be around for a long time. The language is slowly maturing and shedding a lot of it’s idiosyncrasies (sometimes picking up new ones) and the community around it has made great strides in trying to get PHP code not to be terrible (PSR standards, Composer package management, etc..).

Yes, there are usually always new and better ways of accomplishing the same things. I guess my point was that software doesn’t age as rapidly as people think it is. Compared to some hardware for example a lot of the things I mentioned above has tremendous staying power.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:
i forgot: LaTeX is a completely different case… it’s hard to argue why it should change and i won’t even try.

Well.. your point isn’t completely wrong. But Software will only get that old and still be used if the thing you want to accomplish with it doesn’t change.

Text-Editing is a simple task and vim does it pretty good indeed, but then you go along and add those hundreds of features yourself, thus making it pretty different to the vi you would have used 20 years ago.
Even worse: most people nowadays don’t know about terminals and dont get vim at all. For those this old software just seems outdated and unusable. They won’t even find out how to quit without hassle.
I won’t even go into “modern” systems without keyboard (yeah, i know.. those are unusable for you and me, but there seem to be people who think such shit is sufficient), you wouldn’t want to use anything vim-style on those, wouldn’t you? Why should you hide controls behind keyboard-shortcuts, if your keyboard-shortcuts need screen estate on their own?

The same applies to Bash, everything inside LAMP and C wasn’t even a still usable Language 20 years ago, i dont even want to start bashing it and telling you why its bad to use such crap today, while better alternatives like go (or imho even the older-than-c pascal) are around.

Few things.

More law has changed. The computer I brougt 7 years ago is still sufficient. 2Ghz Athlon X2 + 2GB RAM. And the first GB of memory was from a previous rig, even older. Many people still buy dual core with only 4GB of memory (most laptop are dual core), sometime even only 2GB (ultrabooks). So this computer is still current and could be user a few years more.

7 year before that rig, computers had 300Mhz processors with 64MB of memory. We are not on the same scale. You had to buy a new computer every 3 year.

For software, only a very few software mature like you say. The one that everybody know. Like 1 project out of ten thousand. Most programs just die.

Huh, Reply seems wonky, so…

They can get away with it ’cause loads of clueless people continue to publish “pdf” documents that ignore the standard and include loads of the “latest-and-greatest” proprietary crap add-ons, forcing recipients to stick with Adobe Reader if they want to load them. *grumble grumble*

BTW, as someone working from the inside, I get the feeling that the messed-up-to-hell construction industry is in large part to blame for these problems…

@ Mrjones2015:

To be honest, I think this is because they constantly keep adding new features in order to keep the Reader in lock-step with their proprietary PDF authoring tools. Personally, I have never understood why Adobe Reader had a plugin architecture, and why on earth it shipped with plugins for playing embedded audio files for example. 99.9% of the time, all that additional garbage is useless to the average user but Adobe seems to keep plugging away at it because that’s the only way they can justify shipping this monstrosity for free, even if there are adequate open source alternatives.

I mean, how is it that Google can put a fast lean PDF viewer into Chrome that opens documents in mere seconds, whereas Adobe Reader takes like a minute to start and is a Swiss cheese of security holes.

“When you use software for a very long time, it eventually matures and stops breaking”. You dont have to tell me, tell it to the programmers who through a new version of adobe reader at us every 6 month. There is absolutely no maturing or breaking less in that development.