[breatheoften]

Can you imagine how massive the field of software archeology will actually need to be to capture an understanding of the human experience of software development in the “distant past”.

Take any given product or system. what percentage of the software involved in implementing the system was written x years in the past. What’s gonna happen to that distribution in 10 or 100 years?

I wonder how inevitable it is that this percentage of ancient software in virtually every system will just keep growing and growing over time — until the systems of the future are tiny layers built on top of 1000 year old, impenetrable old growth forests which as well have been written by aliens for their understandability ...