Comment by coreyp_1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coreyp_1 | Hacker News Reader

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This. This, so very much!

I built my websites on Drupal 7 and have enjoyed a decade of stability. Now, with D7 approaching EOL in 1 year, I'm looking for a solution that will last another decade. There's no reason for the EOL, either, other than people wanting to force everyone to move on to a newer version. It undoubtedly means more business for some people, as they will be able to reach out to their clients and say, "Your website is about to be a security risk, so you have to pay to update it!" Unfortunately, it means more work for me to support my personal projects.

And why? Because someone somewhere has decided that I should move on to something newer and more exciting. But I don't want new and exciting... I want rock solid!

I'm on vacation this week. Am I learning a new hot language like Rust, Zig, Go, etc.?

Nope.

I have no desire to. I don't trust them to be the same in a decade, anyway.

I'm focusing on C. It's far more enjoyable, and it's stable.

> why? Because someone somewhere has decided that I should move on to something newer and more exciting. But I don't want new and exciting... I want rock solid!

Well, it also could be because someone else decided to move on to something newer and more exciting instead of dutifully maintaining 10y old free software because someone WANTS to have peace of mind on their vacation.

People and companies don't want to pay for maintenance work. I think that this is actually the main reason for all of this complaints about perceived short longevity of libraries and languages. Unfortunately entropy is a bitch, one can put up colossal amount of work up front, pyramids amount of work equivalent but eventually decay will catch up.

How much interaction do your sites have? If you ran a little program locally that took the sitemap, and generated a static site, then you will be immune for life for those security and maintenance arguments.

You can probaly pin the PHP, SQL, and webserver versions, compile them from source so that you will always have the binaries at hand. Then it will last another 1000 years.

However, if you need user interaction, then you are stuck in an eternal rat race of security updates and deprecation, leading to major upgrades, leading to more security updates!

Enjoyable is subjective. I can’t think of anything less enjoyable than hunting for segfaults in C.

I’d call Go pretty rock solid at this point. Modern go vs decade old go isn’t very different. Maybe just the packages tools had 1 major changed.

You’d get the same thing in C if your hardware significantly changes in the 10 years too.

Haha... I agree about it being subjective! I find that I enjoy the process as much as the result. It's like bringing order to a chaotic universe. :)

The thing is, I don't have many segfaults in C, and I find C much easier to debug and hunt down issues in than even C++ (which I also enjoy). Also, because C uses very little "magic", and I also know exactly what I'm getting with my code, I find it much easier to reason about.

I heard a quote the other day while watching a presentation "When you're young you want results, when you're old you want control." I think I'm on the old side now.

As for Go, I genuinely don't have anything against it, but I don't see why I need it either. I don't doubt that others have stellar use cases and impressive results with Go, and that's fine, too, but I don't sense any lack which prompts me to investigate further. I would love to learn more about it, but most of what I see online is either over-the-top (and therefore vomit-inducing) fanboyism, or otherwise unspectacular, which makes me ask "why bother?"

https://backdropcms.org/ ? D7 fork. If you want to stay there.

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