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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Start by changing society to not chase new-ness over stability. Alas, as long as promotion to principal developer and beyond (with the associated hundreds of thousands of USD in compensation increases) depends on doing daring new projects rather than keeping an old project alive, I don't see the trend changing anytime soon.

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> Alas, as long as promotion to principal developer and beyond

This is a problem that we can actually blame on techology rather than programmer psychology. Yes, software changes for many reasons (including the reason you give), but the fundamental reason why software keeps changing is because hardware keeps changing. Any software that refuses to change in order to take advantage of new hardware is replaced by new software that does. You will never, ever get software to stop changing until hardware is frozen in stone... forever.

So, which lang are you talking about?

Probably the best example of a programming language for society would be psychohistory from the Asimov novels, but its spec is vague at best and I know of no working implementations.

I've heard New-speak might also be a good alternative, but it hasn't been updated since 39 years ago.

Fear not! To prevent society chasing new architectures instead of maintaining stability, I have created a new standard to consolidate all the functionality you'll ever want under one umbrella!!

https://xkcd.com/927/

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