Egregoros

@sickburnbro COBOL's attention-getting but most of software is like this. There's are also huge Java codebases and legacy Ruby-on-Rails systems. There are companies running 20-year-old Perl programs with 20-year-old backdoors. There's incredible amounts of investment in Python which is all much slower and much harder to maintain because it's in Python. There's JS and C++ where even the people advancing the language can barely contain their contempt when talking about it. Banks have paleolithic software that can't be touched because any upgrade would need to replicate all of the bugs exactly.

Everyone's working with some software he wish he could rewrite.

@sickburnbro @apropos Hah! Rust. I know nothing about Rust other than Torvalds' takedown of the asshole who was being an asshole about something not being done in Rust. "You are the reason I won't use Rust." Paraphrased.

I recall a dev manager at one tech company I worked at saying he wanted everything written in one language rewritten in his preferred language because the former was not an 'enterprise' language. Yet everything I had been taught up to that point, which has some merit, is that you do not rewrite identical functionality in another language just for the sake of using the latter language. You can age it out over time, sure, but you get zero net gain if you do it all up front, and lose valuable time.

It's a cult, I tell ya.

@totalslothdeath @apropos @sickburnbro that “valuable time” is only “valuable” because of the extremely jewish money-cyclone of the last thirty years, where the only viable pathway to profit involved being the first to dump something into the market space, no matter how shitty, and cycling that repeatedly until the checks stopped cashing

this is a historical aberration that people have built large structures of physical and intellectual capital on top of, all in the erroneous assumption that it must be and will be permanent

the old joke is evergreen: “if people built houses the way they built software, the first woodpecker that came along would wipe out civilization”, and you will note that it is not considered “okay” or “desirable” to build houses that way, we automatically see what’s wrong with importing illiterate Squatemalans to do shit framing jobs but somehow mysteriously assume that it is a deep and fundamental law of nature that we must build software the same way

you will note that the most enduring software does not need to be rewritten; the majortity of the core Unix toolchain comes to mind immediately, which was written in the Time Before Gay Attention-Deficit Software Development by people who actually knew what they were fucking doing and thought about things deeply before doing them, i.e. had no “time pressure”

when the money-cyclone fades, we will discover that all of this modern shitware goes away very quickly, to be replaced by rationally-designed things that do not change because they do not need to