Every piece of software has an expiration date. You can extend its lifespan, but technology keeps moving. What was considered standard on the backend five years ago may look completely different today. I think that's a good thing. Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age as newer, more capable languages and runtimes matured.
We should be celebrating the fact that we can now port almost anything with far less effort, or modernize an existing stack to meet today's performance expectations, requirements, and engineering standards.
Whats the expiration date on, say, the windows 95 version of paint? Because it still loads just fine on my current windows computer, does everything I'd expect from a paint program, and gets out of the way when I don't need it anymore
>Whats the expiration date on, say, the windows 95 version of paint? Because it still loads just fine on my current windows computer,
When people say software is "expired", "obsolete", "legacy", "limited shelf life", etc ... they're not talking about whether somebody somewhere in the world has the ability or idiosyncratic desire to continue running that old software.
Instead, it means the software's ability to be practical and usable in relation to the rest of the current computing ecosystem. E.g. In this perspective, Win95 MSPAINT is "expired/obsolete" because it can't open .PNG and .JPEG files. In today's world, .PNG/.JPEG files are much more common than the .BMP files that MSPAINT 95 can open.
I still have an old 16-bit Microsoft C/C++ v 7.0 compiler from 1992. Did it expire?!? Well, not literally. There's no ticking time bomb in it that checks the system clock and refuses to run. Instead, the issue is that it doesn't have the newer C99/C++98/C++11 features and I can't use it to compile today's ffmpeg source code. That's what people mean by "expired/obsolete".
meerita · · focus · HN ↗
We should be celebrating the fact that we can now port almost anything with far less effort, or modernize an existing stack to meet today's performance expectations, requirements, and engineering standards.
voidUpdate · · focus · HN ↗
jasode · · focus · HN ↗
When people say software is "expired", "obsolete", "legacy", "limited shelf life", etc ... they're not talking about whether somebody somewhere in the world has the ability or idiosyncratic desire to continue running that old software.
Instead, it means the software's ability to be practical and usable in relation to the rest of the current computing ecosystem. E.g. In this perspective, Win95 MSPAINT is "expired/obsolete" because it can't open .PNG and .JPEG files. In today's world, .PNG/.JPEG files are much more common than the .BMP files that MSPAINT 95 can open.
I still have an old 16-bit Microsoft C/C++ v 7.0 compiler from 1992. Did it expire?!? Well, not literally. There's no ticking time bomb in it that checks the system clock and refuses to run. Instead, the issue is that it doesn't have the newer C99/C++98/C++11 features and I can't use it to compile today's ffmpeg source code. That's what people mean by "expired/obsolete".