aevathere's this quote "a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in" that shows up verbatim lots of places cited as a Greek proverb, but the degree to which it is quoted verbatim makes me think there might be a more recent source that's not being attributed properly. regardless of its origin, i like the philosophy: build a better future together little by little doing the things you can today
i think this is one of the reasons i find programming as a profession to be frustrating at times, because so much of what people make ends up being ephemera. people are constantly planting seeds, and then digging up seeds to replace them with more fashionable seeds. the only shade is the shade thrown at the people who had the gall to plant those earlier seeds. meanwhile the next generation of seed planters are lining up for the same plot
elseweather@aeva given the copy-ability of software, it seems like we should be able to build durable shared components and refine them over time. and some stuff is like that? but so much is sweaty, competitive jostling for attention. I blame all the money
@elseweather yeah that sort of thing. the things that actually seem to last all seem to have a lot of popularity and finalized interfaces (at least in their original incarnations). eg, the C ABI, retro console rom hacking, doom, Win32, and so on.
if you build something on just that, the odds of your creation surviving and maybe being of benefit to someone some distant day are a lot higher than if you build it entirely out of whatever is the current passing fad
@elseweather when people come in sneering about "legacy software" and rally support to tear it all down and replace it with some big shiny new thing (which they'll design of course) we lose that foundation and everything built upon it.