
Ask HN: What are the pieces of software that may last forever? - samrohn
My answer git, bitcoin, wikipedia
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newswasboring
I'm pretty sure Matlab will last forever. There is a healthy company backing
it with technology lock in from many, many companies where programming is not
their core competence.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I'm in engineering and get the sense that python is going to make MATLAB
nearly irrelevant, save maybe for some fancy GUI stuff like simulink. Of
course numpy ode solvers can do the same thing as simulink but not as easily.

~~~
newswasboring
What kind of engineering are you doing? Do the companies you work for think of
software dev as one of their core competence? I work in semi conductor
manufacturing and currently employed with one of the largest equipment
manufacturers. The technology lock in is fairly strong in this and other
companies in this field because of 2 reasons

1\. Legacy code is very valuable. Mistakes are costly and thus nobody wants to
change anything once its proven to work.

2\. They hire people who are already proficient in matlab. In all job postings
it is written explicitly as a requirement. There have been and will be
initiatives to move over to other languages but they always die out because
the cost is monumentally high

~~~
acidburnNSA
I may have a skewed view. Your view is probably more representative of
engineering in general. I do nuclear engineering for a _relatively_ young
advanced reactor company that does consider software development one of its
things. We have the oldest of the old legacy codes for physics solvers
(originally written in Fortran IV, now ported to Fortran 90, validated against
experimental nuclear reactors that no longer exist) and we use Python for data
management and automation.

10 years ago people were using Perl for data management and MATLAB for physics
prototyping. Now we all use Python for both.

~~~
newswasboring
So basically you have a more outdated legacy and were able to move out of
matlab because its just a shell. I can't explain why but that is extremely
funny to me.

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m1kal
TeX, BLAS, Vim and Emacs

~~~
gnulinux
BLAS API will probably last forever but the actual implementation library
people use today may not. I suspect the same may be true for vim in the very
long run, maybe someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular
(like vi vs vim). I find it unlikely that that'll happen to Emacs since it's
extremely complex, maybe we'll just move on before that happens.

~~~
routerl
> someone will re-implement it and it'll become more popular (like vi vs vim).

[https://neovim.io/](https://neovim.io/)

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CM30
Does the browser stack (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) count as software? If so, I don't
see any of those going anywhere. The world wide web probably isn't going to be
replaced anytime soon, and web browser fundamentals probably aren't going to
change either.

Then again, programming languages and scripting languages in general seem like
they'll last forever. Sites and programs may come and go, but the languages
they're written in will probably be around for the long haul.

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sgillen
The Linux kernel. Just because it’s everywhere right now. Even in 1000 years
when hardware has moved on, someone will want to virtualize/emulate some
hardware that was running Linux.

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_jon_
MS Excel

------
brutt
/usr/bin/true

~~~
happyrock
/usr/bin/yes

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helij
I would say some form of spreadsheet software will be with us for awhile.

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benologist
I don't think much software will be useful even for one century because of
competing implementations, changing requirements etc, but Github could be an
archaeological treasure-trove one day.

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lasereyes136
Nothing lasts forever. No software, no programming languages, no operating
systems. They will all pass out of use.

I see only git, vim, and emacs lasting until the end of my life.

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RandomBacon
Linux, PHP

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dutymainttech
vi / vim

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zzo38computer
I doubt it will last forever, but some things will last much longer than
others, such as possibly TeX.

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pdimitar
sqlite, definitely. It has a multitude of possible applications _and_ you can
built on top of it to make a more advanced use-case possible.

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gentryb
emacs

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c22
Windows XP. I still see it running ancient kiosks and machine tools.

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m33k44
Hello World examples.

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Tomte
Quicksort pseudo-code.

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joseluis
Pong, Tetris, Forth

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ntnlabs
cobol, obviously :)

~~~
Jeema101
When the Sun has turned into a red giant and all life on earth is reduced to
microbes... Cobol will remain. :)

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amypinka
Libc, zlib, sqlite3

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reikonomusha
75% of code in Common Lisp.

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rocco337
irfan view

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hackerman123469
winrar

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mcv
Anything written in COBOL.

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davegulimlim
SAP will last forever.

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jamieweb
AMI BIOS?

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enjoyyourlife
C

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searchableguy
electron, chrome

~~~
branon
not if there's any sense left in the world

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koolhead17
spreadsheets

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postcynical
leftPad

