| I think that the biggest factor in code longevity is serendipity. You wander into a project that will find the right user interest and some kind of sustainability model that supports its maintenance and continued use. This could be getting into a successful commercial software product, an enterprise solution that might just turn into a legacy, or some vibrant open source community. My oldest code that I myself still use in production is probably some Python web services first prototyped around 2009 and then refactored several times including the port from Python 2.x to 3.x, which we deferred until 2018-2019. It is still in use because we keep finding use for it in funded projects. The Python language and hosting environments have been stable enough to keep it running with minimal externally-forced maintenance. I might have had some older shell scripts that were in personal use for longer periods, but I've found myself retiring them one after another rather than trying to maintain them anymore. This included lots of my own "paperless office" kinds of tasks to acquire, convert, display, or otherwise manipulate various document and image files. I also used my own custom backup tools and email replication strategies for a very long time before begrudgingly moving to contemporary tools. With other open source contributions, it's harder to say how long something lasted. Some of my C code ended up in grid computing libraries that might have also gone for almost 20 years, but I suspect it fell into disuse at least 5 years ago. I also helped arrange some work on SSLeay, which later forked into OpenSSL, but did not author code changes myself. Through my job, I was a bleeding edge user of a lot of Linux features and tried to provide good bug reporting, but did not contribute as an author. This included early SMP support, large file support, kernel-level GPU support, and various wireless and wired networking drivers. My earliest open source engagement was as a beta tester for XFree86 2D drivers around 1994 while in college. I did a bit more of this with early 3D driver testing at my first job. I may have contributed some register dumps and other hardware info, but still would not say I authored any of it. Also as drivers are hardware specific, I don't know how long it took for my efforts to fully dissipate. |