In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin it up in 2050 without major work.

One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.

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ctmnt 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m not sure Go belongs on that list. Otherwise I hear what you’re saying.

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apitman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A large percentage of the code I've written the last 10 years is Go. I think it does somewhat better than the others in some areas, such as relative simplicity and having a robust stdlib, but a lot of this is false security. The simplicity is surface level. The runtime and GC are very complex. And the stdlib being robust means that if you ever have to implement a compiler from scratch, you have to implement all of std.

All in all I think the end result will be the same. I don't think any of my Go code will survive long term.

	▲	hnlmorg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve got 8 year old Go code that still compiles fine on the latest Go compiler. Go has its warts but backwards compatibility isn’t one of them. The language is almost as durable as Perl.