> Think about the greatest, most beautiful cathedrals in Europe. Some of them took more than 500 years to build. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of the computer programs we will build over the next 500 years?

Now that is inspirational.

I've managed to spend my software development career mostly writing programs that I feel are meaningful and useful, and I'm very thankful for that. But nothing I've written is going to last more than 10 or 20 years. I would love to produce an artifact that lasts centuries some day.

So far, discounting stuff that only lives because of some legacy hardware system, we've got maybe LINPACK and... what else?