I believe there's an entire section in Deepness In The Sky about how future coders a million years from now are still hacking stuff together with python.
It seems impossible that, given current economic trajectories, there won't be software archaeology in the future.
Our abusive relationship with modern commercialism has disintegrated the value of art, folklore and tools, both in the eyes of consumers and producers, and we no longer as a society seek to preserve the greatest works of today's most cutting-edge mediums. It's quite a sad state of affairs, which will only be mourned with increasing intensity as time marches on and curious researchers try to piece together the early days of the internet and personal computing.
In the more common case, it's simply archiving -- we still have hardware it can run on (e.g. x86).
The GPGPU and ML stuff is likely going to age poorer, although at least we had the sense to funnel most high level code through standardized APIs and libraries.
Making a competing standard and then having to deal with interop between standards is not simpler or better unless there's an actual benefit to be had.
It’s not hard to imagine a program of ever increasing complexity, highly redundant, error-prone, yet also stochastically, statically, increasingly effective.
The primary pushback from this would be our pathetically tiny short term memory. Blow that limitation up and complexity that seems incomprehensible to us becomes perfectly reasonable.
Situation that have 500 viewpoints and 10,000 variously interacting facts to consider won't be any more comprehensible for a mere human, short term memory limiting us or not.
Was the sarcasm lost on me?
Other things are quite advanced - but computing is rather "dumb". What is there is driven by a great weight of inertia of massive software (all written by regular humans) that itself is too large to fully audit and understand.
The story it tells is very much one about humans and societies.
We do this through categorization. For example, integrated circuits can be broken down into simplistic AND, OR, XOR, NOR, NAND, X OR, and NOt gates. Yet tying those together creates usable components such as Wifi radios and manufacturing automation.
Over simplification are concepts that lack understanding of complex systems. These are exploited by politicians. For example, deregulation will help drive the economy. Yet regulations have been proven to assist the economy long term by preventing the next variation of thalidomide. The panacea drug of the 1950s and 1960s that killed their users or caused massive birth defects.
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”
“Almost precisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.”
“Yes, which I’ve almost completed.”
The essence of many many projects and bane and also the source of so much work for all of us (software devs)
The hero saves the day by hacking old routines lying in the depth of the ship systems.
I'm not sure why there would be cognitive dissonance- sure, my tools may be primitive, but I can also grab my chisel and plane and see that it's similar in form to chisel and plane from 2000 years ago (they look pretty much the same, but these days they're made of stronger stuff). I can easily imagine a Real Programmer 2000 years from now looking back and thinking that python, or even a vacuum tube, is merely a simplified version of their quantum matter assembler.