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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I used to fantasize about having a code base I'd maintain for the next X0 years. Something like Dwarf Fortress, or hell, even TempleOS. Then I slap myself and come to my senses. Who knows how different coding will be 10 years from now? Do I really want to get married to something that's bound to be obsolete sooner rather than later?

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If you aim to create great software that is flexible and powerful from the beginning, you'll be fine. Many businesses are still running very well on my 10 year old code and will be 10 or even 20 years from now I'm sure.

Let this inspire you: http://www.bricklin.com/200yearsoftware.htm

if this is who I think it is, Dan Bricklin, I want to chime in to say thank you for VisiCalc, sir! I was a user and big fan of your work.

for the kids/newbs: effectively the (co)inventor of The Spreadsheet. and consider that spreadsheets were easily the killer app for the first PC's, thus giving them much more business value, in turn causing more money to flow in, helping to create many more paying jobs, etc, in a happy snowball effect which leads to Linux, Google, AWS...

here's where you might say, "sorry, different Bricklin." oops

I've been maintaining my blogging engine [1] for sixteen years now, and very little of the original code base (from 2000) exists. It's been an interesting experiment.

[1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog

I've joined a company with a multi-decade code base, one of whose original devs is still here. Much of it is untouched for a decade.

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