According to Thomas Gagné <
[email protected]>:
:That's an interesting criterion. How reusable will the code be 15 years from
:now? Why not consider what makes code from 15 years ago reusable?
That's a great question - what are some libraries which were written
15 years ago still in use?
BLAS. The earliest recorded literature reference to BLAS is from 1979,
which makes it 24 years old this year. Based on that single data point,
then, the criterion must be that the library is written in Fortran.
First, what is the criteria we are going to use - the code was written
15 years (or more) ago and never touched? Written 15 years ago and
continues to be maintained for portability? Written 15 years ago and
has undergone rewrites over time?
There's probably code in the first category on frozen systems - systems
where the only things being written are new reports, etc. but no new
applications written.
I'm not sure whether that should count, because the question is about
reuse, not longtime continuing use. We could argue about exactly what
we mean by "reuse".
I'm trying to think what open source projects might fall into this category
- what about pbmplus ? The official release was
http://www.acme.com/software/pbmplus/pbmplus_10dec1991.tar.gz
so that software is 12 years ago. I suspect that people still use that
distribution.
We have a software suite currently use in our lab whose original version
dates back to the late 1950s. That makes it about 45 years old,
although it has seen quite a bit of maintenance over the years and
probably not much of the original code remains. It is written in
Fortran. The version I first worked on was pretty much gobbledygook --
working gobbledygook, mind -- that had been, at that time, maintained
for over thirty years and gone through at least three ports to new
systems. The deciding factor there was not accessibility of the code in
any sense, nor any secret or arcane technology. It was just that the
software was at least as useful as any alternative, likely aided by the
fact that the field is sufficiently specialized that the were only a few
alternatives.
Perhaps that kind of story can't happen any more.
John Bollinger
(e-mail address removed)