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Comment by TwistedWeasel | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure? Construction materials are evolving and changing every few years (engineered lumber, modern environmentally friendly methods, etc) whilst we still use base operating systems designed in the 60's for most of our services.

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Take a look at a house built [100, 50, 25] years ago. Compare it to a house built today.

Then do the same exercise with some piece of software.

yep, both are significantly different in many way, houses built 50 years ago have a lot of differences to modern houses. Software from 50 years ago, is also significantly different but the fundamentals of both are the same, foundations, walls, roof trusses, siding, filesystems, operating systems, processes, threads, data structures etc. We may use Go instead of C and we may use engineered lumber instead of Douglas Fir for door headers.

Go vs C: That's 50 years.

Wooden house building fundementals: That's like 200-500 years.

last 50 years of change includes modern nail guns, engineered lumber, hurricane anchors, plywood roof sheathing, vapor barriers, and countless other differences in how homes are built and the tools we use to do it. There is nothing special about software, other industries also evolve and grow their methods and tools. We just change software with reckless abandon and little regard for the reasons we started down any given path in the first place.

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