You know, that all sounds good, but can you honestly expect software to last that long? Heck, the US constitution only lasted until 1932, and its authors were a heck of a lot smarter than we are.

Part of the problem is that the world changes so quickly within technology. Who, in 1992, would have foreseen the explosion of web commerce in less than a decade? Not many, I'd wager. The programming paradigms of the 60s were outdated 25 years later, and technology had proceded at a pace where a lot of programming problems had been solved by quicker, cheaper, more powerful hardware.

I'm not saying what he says doesn't have some merit; I always write code so that I don't have to spend a lot of time supporting it and so it will last a while. (At least, that's the goal.) Back in '98, while on a contract, I wrote some stopgap software that was supposed to last three months; it is just now being shut down, I heard. However, the reason it lasted so long had little to do with my software and mostly to do with management moving at the speed of continental glaciation. Even management can make a change within 200 years (thought admittedly it's not a certainty.)