I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though.
Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business problem. It probably lasts 5/10 years and then someone rewrites it in a new language, or more often the task isn’t relevant anymore so the code gets deleted.
I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there. Most of the buildings that go up, come down again in a few decades once regulations/fashions change or the new owner of the site wants something else.
Every so often something like a Cathedral gets built, and those get built to last. But most people don’t get to work on those. If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.
Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business problem. It probably lasts 5/10 years and then someone rewrites it in a new language, or more often the task isn’t relevant anymore so the code gets deleted.
I find myself thinking that maybe if I’d been in civil engineering or something then I’d be building stuff that lasts, but speaking to people who’ve worked a long time in construction has taught me that it’s the same there. Most of the buildings that go up, come down again in a few decades once regulations/fashions change or the new owner of the site wants something else.
Every so often something like a Cathedral gets built, and those get built to last. But most people don’t get to work on those. If there’s a software equivalent of a Cathedral then I still haven’t found it.