I must disagree. One of my contracts last year was writing new code in IBM System 370 Assembler, a language I learned almost forty years ago. The interface documents I worked from were "copyright IBM Corp., 1960". I got the contract because I did remember the difference between a BALR instruction and BASR....
"The more Things change, the more Things stay the same"? Not quite -- But I did use a fifty year old language and a thirty year old Debugger to implement an Agile based Test Oriented Development Process and delivered a subroutine library that plugs into an IPv6 enabled Network Monitor on hardware the Gene Amdahl would have felt comfortable with...
"Those who forget History are doomed to repeat it" -- Santayana
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I Go Back to Sleep, Now.
OGB
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Well I hope you are right; as I would love it if Tk and Perl5 was still going strong 40 years from now, and all my postings were studied for useful techniques. Just somehow I doubt it. :-)
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I respectfully disagree, and I think sundialsvc4 has a good (if not exactly novel) point.
most of the stuff written nowadays will be useless in a few years
I see people still getting good use out of nodes written 10-12 years ago. "Posterity" is relative. To suppose that people won't find nodes written today useful in 5 years is more preposterous than not.
replaced by Perl42 or whatever
Perl 6 has been almost a reality for ... 10 years? Who knows how many more Christmases? And they're always telling us, Don't worry, Perl 6 will not replace Perl 5. Your Perl 5 programs will continue to run; Perl 5 will continue to be maintained; you can still write Perl 5 if you want to.
And the Perl 5 content of this site will continue to be relevant.
to think that any of us will be remembered
The OP was talking about the content we write here, not about us. Who's got the ego?
I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies .
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In a vacuum, the OP's point would be valid, though (as jdporter said), not exactly novel. Anything you write may survive for the ages and continue to be helpful (or harmful) far longer than you expected. Google Groups has Usenet posts of mine back to 1995, including some I'm proud of and some that would make me wince. On the other hand, many online forums to which I've contributed have disappeared entirely or lost all their data in crashes at least once. So you never know.
However, this post doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in the context of the other recent thread about enemies and personal down-voting, it comes off (in my opinion) as an alternate way to say, "Be nicer (to me)," by adding, "because your words may be remembered for a long time."
Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.
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Who's got the ego? I respectfully believe it's sundialsvc4 thats got it. :-)
My comment was just made to throw some realistic light on the fact that what we write and what we do is really pretty insignificant in terms of the passage of Time and history. Where is Cobol now? Visual Basic? Basic? Pascal? Even the title "Yellow Pages" makes my point. Where are the old reliable Yellow Pages we all knew in our youth? They now are either obsolete, useless, or converted to online versions which even itself is threatened by conventional search engines like Google. When I was young, I fully expected the Yellow Pages to be around forever, and now it's just a relic of history. Did I expect Google to come along? Never saw it coming.
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