I'm vaguely fascinated by software archaeology as in "deepness in the sky" for eg. COBOL and PHP bore me, but I can imagine getting really into say 500 year old software. If I were born in 2700, I'd be a software archeologist maybe.
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I hope that Internet Historian/Archaeologist/Anthropologist is a job that I can get paid to do some day 😤.
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We’re already there - the cloud all starts with #!/bin/sh - which is a shibboleth
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Who needs 500 years? It's a hobby for me. The old code bases and forums are already difficult to track down, and stylistically different to the current day. eg web.archive.org/web/2015011302
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Buildings have an archeology to them. Old heating systems, ways of doing electricity or gas light networks can be seen if you look. Parallels to software and platforms forgotten.
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500 year old programs would be indecipherable without radical life extension. You'd spend all your time just learning the macros ("high level structure").
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I love that term. Any senior developer who has had the privilege of working on a legacy code base knows exactly what Vinge means. Dig or build from scratch? IMO, this will only become more relevant as blockchains mature, where dependable, reliable, and proven are measured in $.
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You can be an intellectual archeologist today ala Jordan Peterson or Julian Jaynes...
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I should get one of those sliding rulers that I hear about in stories of my ancestors. They sound fascinating.
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There's a fair bit of code nobody really understands in BLAS, LAPACK, and things like the LPC-10 codec in Sox; probably also in glibc. I think nobody's touched the LPC-10 codec in a quarter century. You'll probably also enjoy reading drmaciver.com/2017/01/progra
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