[ethelward]

> do we still want to be using generations-old software in the years to come?

*BSD, vim, Emacs, Perl, C, Apache & Linux in some way, gcc, the GNU userland, Air company & banks infrastructure come to mind, and they still do the work.

[_sh]

There are a couple of ways to look at this. Philosophically, to pick any one of your examples, my emacs is version 26.1. Is this the same software as emacs 15.10 released April 1985? Will a perl 6 program run on perl 5? Am I the same person I was 5 years ago?

Another take: what is the ratio of the same software still in use after, say, 10 years to all software in use? I would argue that more than 99% of all software (e.g. by version number) is no longer in use after a mere 5 years. Software is inherently disposable, let's not pretend we're building bridges that will stand for generations.

My point is that developers (I'm one) have a hard time with the qualities of software: we don't understand the nature of software change, and bicker about what bumping a semver number means, and we fight its disposable nature by engineering it to the point where it could run for a decade (it won't).