Code as historical artifact
October 26, 2026
So, has anyone really thought much about how weird it's gonna be in like, 100 or 200 years from now, when a lot of software becomes legit historical artifacts. Like, not just "this is old" but more specifically "this thing was written by people whose grandkids no longer walk this Earth".
Especially weirder will be if some of the same software is still in use. Is some descendant of Vim or NeoVim or something going to still be commonly used by developers? Will the Linux kernel still be used on all major servers? Are we going to still be writing our programs in C and Python and JS? Will we being using GCC, or CPython, or NPM to run that code, or will their be new implementations?
How strange will it be for somebody to be reading through code that was written in a time so distant from their own. Our own oldest code tends to date to around the 1970s at the most. To a person living in 2140, or 2218, will it be like if I were reading through computer code written when Abraham Lincoln was a child?
And to think that perhaps some lines of that code all that long ago would somehow still be in use, still be running on production machines. Perhaps my own computer would be running this pre-abolition era code in order to boot my desktop up.
It's weird enough as it is to sometimes look back and think about how many modern software projects originate in the early days of computing. How much weirder then will it be for a culture that no longer carries in its recent history a time before the computer was ubiquitous?
copied from my post on Mastodon: https://defcon.social/@riverpunk/117507074082351558