I feel that quite a bit of software written these days is designed to have a short shelf life. I wonder how many of the "Show HN" posts will work, or even be useful, in five years? How much will be maintainable?

I've been thinking a lot about Matthew Crawford's writings on mechanical things[0] and how they might apply to my own craft as a software developer. The work, as described generally on HN, is still all about moving fast and breaking things. It doesn't matter if the Python code I crank out today works in five years (or is maintainable in five years) -- I just need to get my product to market. Some of us work in other domains where sustainability and repair-ability are important: if my software is going to be in the field, in users' hands, for ten years, I need to consider how reasonable it might be fix bugs. If I have to fight just to get the software to run, I've already lost that battle. In these cases, the dependability of something like Perl is really great. The complaint against Python here isn't about the language itself (I think many people would agree it is quite nice to use), but rather the larger ecosystem, which makes it very hard to maintain software over the long haul.

[0] See Shop Class as Soulcraft, The World Beyond Your Head, and Why We Drive.