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by ForHackernews 2848 days ago
I find it pretty laughable to claim that software written in this (brand new?) language, progsbase, will last a "ballpark" of "centuries". The transistor isn't even a century old.

To my knowledge, nothing created by humans has lasted centuries with the equivalent of one day/year of maintenance work.

3 comments

Not only that, but their chart makes it look like adopting older languages now will give you more bit rot resistance.

C2: C89 or Python 2 a few decades a developer week

C3: C or Python a decade a developer month

When it should read:

C2: C99 or Python 3 a few decades a developer week

C3: C89 or Python 2 a decade a developer month

If you start a project today with python 2, the bit rot will be far worse[1] than python 3 which is now stable and doesn't seem to have any plans for future compatibility breaking changes.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/750833/

C89, C99, Python 2, 3 were only examples as the table header says.
It looks like progsbase is essentially a non-free version of Haxe (progsbase requires $65 per month per developer). There is no source available and the code library is full of trivial examples.
Haxe is an independent programming language that can be compiled to other languages. Progsbase is very different: It is a language in other languages.
See the answer I gave maxxxxx above.

Further, progsbase is not a brand new language, it is (mostly) a subset of most existing languages. The selection of the subset is new, but not the contents. This is why the progsbase repository contains examples that can be translated into Java, C, C++, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Python and Visual Basic.