> The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will last into the future.
"The term Lindy refers to Lindy's delicatessen in New York, where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where ... they conduct post-mortems on recent show business 'action'"."
And no more should be read into that. There are solutions to problems which are adequate, e.g. "chair", where further changes can be expected to be modest. And since the problem isn't going away (unless someday we're told that sitting kills us and that we need to stand or lay instead), the solution won't either.
Otoh, there are technologies which simply supersede and obsolete others. E.g. UTF8 has ASCII as subset and hence I don't expect to see the latter around for long.
UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII “as she is spake” but not strictly speaking ASCII as any ASCII control characters will break UTF-8. It also breaks any 8-but extensions/code pages. ASCII vs HTML is a bad example though because HTML is used globally and although ASCII is too this is more a historical artefact. It’s not hard to imagine ASCII dying out over the next few years while HTML continues to adapt to every encoding under the sun and pure ASCII becomes used less and less ...
Nope. If you read an ASCII file with control characters in Java you’ll get an exception. Also it won’t work with the 8-bit ASCII variants. Neither are “true Scotsmen” of course, but the point still stands that HTML could yet be more durable.
I’m almost certain the default encoding for reading/writing files in Java is UTF-8 and similarly for the source files. I don’t think I encounter wide char data much really at all day to day ...
"The term Lindy refers to Lindy's delicatessen in New York, where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where ... they conduct post-mortems on recent show business 'action'"."
And no more should be read into that. There are solutions to problems which are adequate, e.g. "chair", where further changes can be expected to be modest. And since the problem isn't going away (unless someday we're told that sitting kills us and that we need to stand or lay instead), the solution won't either.
Otoh, there are technologies which simply supersede and obsolete others. E.g. UTF8 has ASCII as subset and hence I don't expect to see the latter around for long.