Sorry, but I don't agree. Really great software never ages. Like math: if it's correct, it never ages. Period. If it does age, it means it was not well engineered from the very beginning.<p><pre><code> «10 y.o. technologies are history. 10 y.o. software without major upgrades is dead. While 10 y.o. cars are quite good and decent.»
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What about the Internet? What about LISP? What about UNIX? I could name a thousand pieces of software that date back from the 70s and are today as powerful and "new" as they were back then.<p>If the web does age, and it does, that should give us some pointers on what's wrong with it.
I can't decide if this post is asking people to move fast and break things, or iterate gracefully.<p>I think iteration is very powerful, but we don't seem to have fixed the problem of when something needs to iterate beyond its old ecosystem.<p>I haven't said that coherently, but I mean things like WordStar or WordPerfect moving from DOS into Windows - these two huge word processing systems failed to make the transition and are now niche products used by a tiny number of geek enthusiasts. They reached a point when iteration wasn't enough, and they needed some other thing.