[ozim]

I have a bit different view.

If some app is not updating - there is not much use for it.

Just like houses - yeah you can have 100 years old house but if you did not invest in it and expect to be just as good as new you are in world of pain.

Same with cars - 10 years and you really have to change quite some parts.

Applications are ideas - we expect that ideas don't "wear out" - well most of ideas wear out rather quickly and are not useful for centuries.

My javascript app is not Plato "cave allegory" - but that is fine and also what makes javascript app valuable, I can throw it away and rebuild from scratch even better with low effort. Data storage or formats should be usable for at least 5-8 years. There are things that should be preserved for longer - but these are exceptions. Most stuff after 2 years is not that useful anymore.

[amoe_]

You have low expectations; I have Racket programs that have worked for over 10 years essentially untouched. More or less the same with Perl. We should be aspiring to Plato's cave (while accepting that we won't reach that).

[causi]

If some app is not updating - there is not much use for it.

That depends entirely on the program. My CD ripper/burner is going on twenty years old and it works flawlessly. Same with my audio recorder and the sensor viewer for my phone. On the occasion I need to make a slideshow or write a document, Office 2007 works just fine with no bullshit, granted I don't view third-party files in it. ES File Explorer Pro is still by far the best Android file manager despite not being updated in three and a half years. I wouldn't be particularly upset if I had to use a version of VLC that was ten years out of date.

[bscphil]

> My CD ripper/burner is going on twenty years old and it works flawlessly.

This is probably a good example though. The state of the art in CD ripping has advanced significantly over the last 15 years. If you care about bit-perfect rips or even just reliable error correction, it would pay to know about the advances in Exact Audio Copy (Win), XLD (Mac), or Whipper (Linux). All of these have seen releases since 2020. If you have a newer CD drive model, having an updated database in your ripping program can help you get perfect rips, as same-model drives typically have identical bit offsets. In addition, bug fixes can prevent (admittedly rare) ripping issues.

[causi]

Good to know if I ever hear an error in a track I ripped. Hasn't happened in two decades so far, but you never know.

[bscphil]

The odds of it ever being noticeable are indeed quite low.

[opan]

>ES File Explorer Pro is still by far the best Android file manager despite not being updated in three and a half years.

Is there something special about it? I'd typically recommend either Ghost Commander or Simple File Manager from f-droid to someone.

[causi]

The way it handles separate windows and also network file shares. Even highly-acclaimed managers like Total Commander only support two windows at a time and don't really do customization. When I open ES my first window is my internal storage, swipe right for my microSD card, swipe right for my network drives, and swipe right again for another copy of my network drives. As many windows as I want, in any default configuration I want, with no screwing around with mounting or unmounting network shares. Also the built-in equivalent of SpaceSniffer is quite handy.

[bombolo]

Updating is fine… bash for example keeps having new versions and new features.

However this doesn't mean that we must fix every bash script every 6 months because of a bash update.

[augustk]

That's why I stick to the POSIX shell (sh)

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

[checkyoursudo]

> well most of ideas wear out rather quickly and are not useful for centuries

I'm not a religious person, but already a couple thousand years ago the bible folk rightly identified that there is nothing new under the sun. Or as BNL eloquently puts it, "it's all been done before."

I don't know how we could ever quantify it or qualify it, but I would guess that most ideas stick around.

[ozim]

Couple hundred years ago people were still thinking that Earth is in the center of the universe :)

Ideas that survived is survivorship bias - everyday life just shifts around.

[LtWorf]

> Couple hundred years ago people were still thinking that Earth is in the center of the universe :)

They were? Were they educated people or just some random people?

[ozim]

Well just read up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus

Couple hundred years ago - this was up to 600 years ago - I was not saying about 100 or 200.

[LtWorf]

Well 200 is "a couple"