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Comment by Edmond | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

The primary reason the software development field has evolved to be preoccupied with saving/re-using/inter-op code is because of the difficulty of building even the most trivial piece of software.

Unfortunately code hoarding is simply a reflection of the age-old human flaw of wanting to recoup sunk cost, you assume if you've invested a lot of time into something, it must be worth holding on to for as long as possible :)

If software was as easy to make as a piece of office stationary is easy to write on, no one would care about code reuse/saving/interop...you don't see anyone saving post-it notes or even excel docs for indefinite reuse.

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I couldn't agree more. A personal anecdote; I used to think about what would be my legacy as software developer? Anything that I write would be obsolete in few years. Nothing I wrote back then remained working. This thought was depressing me.

Then I realized that what I'm actually creating and maintaining is not code. It's the mindset behind the code, and the skillset to convert ideas to working pieces of software. My legacy would be to learn through experimenting, and to help others learn the same.

Who has a legacy anyway and why would a normal person expect to have one? A tailor's clothes get worn out, a farmer's food is eaten, the cook's dish eaten, the hotel cleaner's "output" gets messy again, the architect's apartment block torn down etc.

Who has a true legacy outside a small minority of philosophers, artists, scientists and political leaders?

I think even the idea of having a tombstone is a sort of legacy. People made cave-paintings to leave something behind. We all want to cling to existence somehow and want to leave a mark on world when we leave. The simplest way maybe is to have children, so your gene would live on after you.

> We all want to cling to existence somehow and want to leave a mark on the world when we leave.

Not everyone wishes to leave a mark on the world after we are gone. There are entire philosophical branches dedicated to the idea of embracing mortality and accepting that which makes us human.

I feel like that's just a way to cope with the horror of death.

Naturally, but it's also a way to approach death if you don't consider it a horror.

One can embrace mortality while also wishing to leave a positive mark on the world.

Most of the paintings get lost, even sometimes masterpieces.

Bloodlines die out or change enough to not be recognizable.

I see Excel documents that have been reused hundreds of times for dozens of different purposes over the last 20 years. I see that all the time. "Too many styles", VBA macros from the 90s, hundreds of items in the Name manager that refer to long-forgotten hard drives or #REF!. It's everywhere.

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