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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

I'm writing something designed to last, and here is how I am doing it:

1) I am doing it by myself, without any corporate sponsors or financial pay.

2) I am writing it in such a way that it could have already been working for 25 years.

There is code in Microsoft Outlook that, although updated over the years, is essentially the same file format as it was in 1994 - and the code is unlikely to have been entirely rewritten in that time

In 2010, Microsoft published the PST file format, and the latest documentation was updated this year

That code was started in 1992, and first shipped in 1995 - 25 years in the wild!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_forma...

I'm trying something similar since I believe in having a stable core which is why I'm using Java as I predict the JVM to last a while.

I understand the logic behind the first point, but not the second - could you expand? Does it mean you aren't utilising anything that doesn't already have a track record of sticking around (choose boring technology + tech that has been around for a while?), or writing it in such a way that it is backwards compatible with the last 25 years worth of OS/CPU Architectures?

I like that 2nd criteria. Seems like a smart way to avoid components that are much more likely to get software decay.

Have you been programming for 25 years?

> Have you been programming for 25 years?

I have longer than that and it is really scary that software to see that software I wrote early 90s is still used. I thought, at the time, it would be rewritten in something cooler every few years. But nope. It does make me pick tech that can or will last; not many dependencies, open source, jvm, .net core or C/C++, so it is possible to revisit it in 20 years and not be completely lost (like I imagine it would be with js frameworks/libs/deps at the moment).

Yes, at least that long, and about 20 of it for the Web.

What language do you choose? Possibly c or java?

FORTRAN

Real programmers use Butterflies

https://xkcd.com/378/

I chose:

Perl as the primary language

HTML/CSS for front-end

JavaScript for optional front-end enhancements

txt as the base data format

SQLite for cache and indexing

PHP for optional server connectors

PGP for the identity system

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