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by bluefirebrand 1517 days ago
> Chances are, the next developer will not come on in 5 years, but in 15 years.

That doesn't seem likely to me at all. More likely in the next 6 months than in 15 years. Why are you planning for 15 years out? The company you are working for might not be around in 15 years. Code might not even be recognizable in 15 years. All of our programs might be written by AI in 15 years.

Optimizing for the short term makes way more sense to me. 2 or 3 years out, not 15.
1 comments
Hackbraten 1517 days ago
Human labor is expensive. Companies aren’t going to throw away a perfectly good asset they poured tens of millions in, unless they have to. I don’t see why a well-written, time-tested piece of software shouldn’t still be around 15 years down the road.
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bluefirebrand 1517 days ago
The initial comment was not about software quality but about "the popular framework now might not be popular in the future"

I don't see any contradiction between creating well written, time tested software and also choosing currently popular frameworks to work in.

If your React app is well written and stable and well tested, I see no reason it shouldn't be available in 15 years. And if you can't find React Developers to hire in 15 years to work on it, that's tough. Pay to have some trained.

It is a similar situation to COBOL is today.

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Hackbraten 1516 days ago
Except that unlike React, COBOL doesn’t bring along 10000 dependencies written by 5000 different authors, randomly abandoned a few months later but teeming with unpatched vulnerabilities.

Sure, somehow I’m going to find React developers 15 years from now to maintain my line-of-business React app but how secure will it be?

One could argue that I can rewrite the framework-dependent parts. But rewrites cost money, too.

I love new stuff but I still think that, depending on the app, it may make good economic sense to plan ahead for it to be useful after a decade or two.

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bluefirebrand 1514 days ago
I'm not sure where you are getting 10,000 dependencies from.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react

Maybe I'm missing something but npm suggests it's only one dependency, which also only had one dependency.

I get that create_react_app pulls in a ton of dependencies, but React itself is not a culprit of dependency hell.

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Hackbraten 1511 days ago
Good point. You’re absolutely right.
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