Mastodawn

Luci Rocks Sep 3, 2019

concept: get on my lawn software.
a software design philosophy that believes good software ages like a fine wine. it shuns trends and salesmen disguised as programmers, shuns the fancy new framework. instead, gomls curates quality old software like a carefully tended forest. software that has stood the test of time, and, though it seems antiquated, it’s as robust as cast iron anvil.

software for the mature discerning adult

Luci Rocks Sep 6, 2019

1. SQLIte came out in august of 2000, which makes it 19 years old. it has the distinguished honour of being the only program in existence that uses filesystem APIs correctly.

Luci Rocks Sep 6, 2019

2. RSYNC came out in June 1996, it is 23 years old. it is the only program that I trust for copying large files and large amounts of files between any two points. it natively supports ssh and, in some configurations, uses an extremely clever rolling checksum algorithm that makes me seriously question the sanity of games consoles and operating systems vendors who do not use RSYNC for system and software updates.

Luci Rocks Sep 6, 2019

rsync does have this one extremely irritating quirk though: different behavior on the presence of, or ansence of trailing slash on paths, that is basically impossible to memorise.

Luci Rocks Sep 6, 2019

so that this list isn’t unixy stuff only
3. Excel, initial release, 1987, 32 years ago.
love it or hate it, excel gets shit done, it still gets shit done, and it’s been getting shit done for a very long time.

its fomula language and macros system fulfills the promise of users sooving their own problems in a way every other system has utterly failed, possibly because it’s cloaked from the ruinous grasp of “professional programmers” attempting to turn it into a “real” application platform.

Luci Rocks Sep 6, 2019

fun fact: excel formalae are the world’s most popular pure functionsl programming language. move the fuck over, haskell .

unspeakablehorror (Reinstated)Sep 6, 2019

@zensaiyuki I have no words...

codesections Nov 8, 2019

> fun fact: excel formalae are the world’s most popular pure functionsl programming language. move the fuck over, haskell.

Not *entirely* related, but I love this story about the project to add the first "real" version of excel macros in 1991: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/

My First BillG Review

In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…

Joel on Software

Luci Rocks Sep 6, 2019

4. NES roms.
if you want hyper sentient dog scientists in the year 40,000 to be able to run your software, write it as an NES rom. trust me on this.

Luci Rocks Nov 8, 2019

5. Hypercard. 1987, 32 years old.
does this belong on the list, given that it’s no longer maintained?

well, there are still people who still use hypercard, either in a physical old mac or via mac emulators. they use hypercard to get useful work done. including bill atkinson. there are many imitators and clones, but somehow none come close to the approachability and and functionality tradoffs of the original. there are practical benefits to software that never changes.

Luci Rocks Nov 8, 2019

6. TeX, 1978 (41 years old)
well, I can’t say much about this since i haven’t heavily used it. but despite many other formats coming and going, the LaTeX math expressions are still the undisputed defacto standard for encoding mathematical expressions.

and its line breaking algorithm is still more sophisticated than the algorithms used in most desktop word processing and publishing software.

Luci Rocks Nov 13, 2019

7. Graphviz and the DOT language, before 1991 (28 years ago)
go away microsoft visio. don’t worry about clicking and dragging around little boxes forever. just type in a more or less simple text based language, and graphviz spits out a flowchart. and you’re done.

dot -> graphviz;
graphviz -> svg;
graphviz -> png;
graphviz -> ps;

Luci Rocks Jun 7, 2020

8. Milkytracker’s first release was in 2005 (15 years ago) but its core is much older. Milkytracker is built to spiritually continue and be compatible with older dos based and amiga based tracker. What is a tracker? It’s music making software whose UI is patterned after the style of music making software that was originally popular on the C64 which were called “trackers”. I’m not a musician, i can’t make it work. but this thing can still run on ancient pocket computers.

Luci Rocks Jun 17, 2020

9. Cron (1975, 45 years old)
need to automate something according to a schedule? what are you doing fucking around with things like jenkins or bamboo? you don’t need fucking java to run a script twice a day.

cron uses the crontab format, which fhough it is somewhat cryptic and error prone, is one of the most robust and enduring file formats ever; tab seperated values, one record per line, commented lines start with #. boom. done. no need for libxml, parse it with 6 lines of C.

Charles U. Farley Nov 8, 2019

@zensaiyuki You have an interesting combination of proprietary and free software on your list. The challenge with proprietary software is that while it's under development it is constantly getting new features (and bugs) added. And when it stops being developed it's dead. Free software doesn't have the same incentive for the maintainers to keep adding features forever, so it's able to stabilize. I guess the wine analogy would be "mellow"?

Charles U. Farley Nov 8, 2019

@zensaiyuki Rsync, TeX, and SQLite all qualify under the "stable" criterion I was interested in a while back. Probably also most of GNU, and maybe Linux LTS kernels after they've been baking long enough.

༒ ɐɥɔǝʇɐɯ ʍǝɹpuɐ ༒Jun 18, 2020

@zensaiyuki did you see the recent #hyperJam? https://cancel.fm/hyperjam/ :)

Merveilles HyperJam, April 2020

Luci Rocks Jun 18, 2020

@amatecha saw it and followed the creators, not realising they were the creators until later.

The Tech Lord ⊕ `Lex Pendragon Nov 8, 2019

@zensaiyuki For some reason, I assumed you were implying that the Doctor's K-9 ran on NES ROMs.

FiXato (fallback)Nov 8, 2019

@LexPendragon
who says it doesn't❓ ;)
@zensaiyuki

The Tech Lord ⊕ `Lex Pendragon Nov 8, 2019

@FiXato @zensaiyuki I am perfectly fine with this. I just want proof of that.

I just want more NES ROMs and K-9 in general.

Nova Storm Nov 10, 2019

@zensaiyuki I came to realize that with the rate that people make new NES emulators, they will absolutely keep making them for every new computing platform that comes out, probably indefinitely

unspeakablehorror (Reinstated)Sep 6, 2019

@zensaiyuki spreadsheets are great for certain types of problems, not so great for other types. A very intriguing database-calculator hybrid.

The Doctor Nov 8, 2019

@zensaiyuki It is certainly a shark wielding a Swiss Army chainsaw.

hef Sep 8, 2019

@zensaiyuki I feel the pain of update systems that do not use rsync or something similar to rdiff to deploy incremental updates.

Paul Mairo May 28, 2020

@zensaiyuki You should check out https://github.com/facebook/wdt very interesting piece of software.

GitHub - facebook/wdt: Warp speed Data Transfer (WDT) is an embeddedable library (and command line tool) aiming to transfer data between 2 systems as fast as possible over multiple TCP paths.

Warp speed Data Transfer (WDT) is an embeddedable library (and command line tool) aiming to transfer data between 2 systems as fast as possible over multiple TCP paths. - GitHub - facebook/wdt: Wa...

GitHub

Luci Rocks May 28, 2020

@rmpr we’ll see in 23 years if it’s interesting

Paul Mairo May 28, 2020

@zensaiyuki 23 minus 5 actually

alcinnz Nov 8, 2019

@zensaiyuki I think it's worth saying: SQLite is quite possibly the best written, documented, and (supposedly) tested codebases I've ever seen!

Highly recommended from me!