This sparked a shower thought.
Instead of developing infinitely long software that perpetually updates, can we create many tiny products that just persist?
You mean the decades old concept of all that software I use every day, the GNU operating system tools? All the command line tools like 'grep', they are basically done, stable and reliable. And we have one tool for one purpose.
All these ideas have been there for a long time. But they work only if nobody wants to earn money with the software development.
We really take GNU for granted. What an incredible achievement and legacy for all of us in the industry. Say what you might about Stallman but he deserves massive credit and respect for it.
This precisely. There's so many perfect little tools in the *nix environment, stable as rocks. There's one-character tricks in text editors that nets what you want from MSO or 90% of what people generally want from PS/Gimp/Krita, all while using the same text encoding that's been in use since 1974.
The big gap in users is between "computer familiarity" and "computer proficiency". People associate environments with home, and the older the enterprise user base is, the more they want their mouse menus and clicker buttons. Introduce a text interface, say so long to 90% of the enterprise users . . even if the windowed equivalent is a hellish nested circular menu labyrinth no one can use the same way twice running.
While the days around 2003 when the project had +2500 commits per year are long gone, coreutils is still fairly active, with ~200 commits per year.
Even looking at really simple tools like 'yes', git blame shows a bunch of fairly recent changes.
On commands with specific repository like grep (https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/log/), the project actually peaked not too long ago, in 2010, with 355 commits a year. And the current activity levels (82 commits 2023) are not that far off this high.
Of course, commits are not everything. I expect the actual code changes to be smaller (lots of 1-5 lines fixes vs ~100 lines new functionality). But these tools are still evolving quite significantly.
I propose calling this idea Uniquely Minimal Individual Extensions, aka UMIX philosophy, and creating a suite of small self-contained programs that can be flexibly composed to create more complex ones.
All these ideas have been there for a long time. But they work only if nobody wants to earn money with the software development.