One thing I really like about software is that it can theoretically live forever. I know bit rot is real, but with some maintenance, and even a quite small community, it can keep getting revitalized basically forever.[1]

The field is generally still young, so I look forward to good solid software just getting older and older and still working well. Makes it worth learning and internalizing.

C is in its 50s, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere (:

Part of what pains me about much modern software, with its always-online and tied-to-some-cloud-service nature, is that it tends to die. The learning you do goes to waste, when some fickle company pulls the plug in the future.

I like to build stuff that lasts, whether it's a cathedral or a bazaar, and I like to use stuff that was built in that way, too.

[1] Okay, forever is a long time. Maybe some day keyboards will be extinct, and that will make keyboard-centric software obsolete. Same could be true for screens, or even the broad architecture of computing hardware as we know it. But those changes tend to happen slowly, and there's time to adapt.