The point of writing software isn't to maintain it forever

http://richo.psych0tik.net/blog/2013/04/24/the-point-of-writing-software-isnt-to-maintain-it-forever/

by richo • 13 years ago

1 4 13 years ago

richo.psych0tik.net

Millennium• 13 years ago

Eternal maintenance is not the point of writing software; it's just an unfortunate inevitability.

amitparikh• 13 years ago

Exactly. And the example given (cron) was designed with the Unix-mentality of writing a program that does one thing really well and does it without breaking. Yeah, sure, some may argue that cron is fairly complicated, but it doesn't suffer from the maintainability needs of a very complex piece of software like some enterprise systems.

richo2• 13 years ago

Shouldn't that be what we're striving for?

Much though I really hate to admit this, npm and the node community are on the right track here.

richo2• 13 years ago

Is it though?

Take this example, there's really no reason for me to do anything EXCEPT that the upstream dependencies have been yanked. Now I need to do a bunch of porting.

The point of writing software isn't to maintain it forever

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