> software is likely not usable after 3-5 years
Whoa whoa wait! How did we get to this point? Maybe I’m living in the past, but software should work essentially forever. There are no moving parts. No wear/maintenance items. It doesn't distort like a photocopy when loaded to and from media.
The only thing that should cause working software to fail is some underlying change to its foundation: an incompatible OS or browser change or deprecated API, and so on, and we should hold platform vendors accountable for regressions and breakage. I wish platforms took backward compatibility seriously.
Apart from a cosmic ray flipping a bit somewhere, there is no physics reason software should “wear out.” How did this become a fringe point of view?
