I posted a graph on LinkedIn. It showed that of the 10 million open source projects tracked by ecosyste.ms, more than half haven’t been updated in two years. I didn’t suggest old was bad or good, but I got a number of replies about most of this software is “done” so it’s fine. We don’t have any evidence either way, I’m unwilling to make any claims about the numbers (yet, I’m working on it). This got me wondering what it would mean for software to be “done”. Which then led to the question is anything ever done? It’s a lot harder to figure this out than I had expected.
Mmm, interesting. Doesn’t Haskell have a monad that represents everything external to the program, for like producing I/O? In some ways I suppose that mentality makes explicit this idea you’re expressing that the environment the program runs in is implicit in the program? A software equivalent of “no man can step in the same river twice, for neither is it the same river nor is he the same man?”