Ask HN: What Code That We Write Today Will Still Be Used in Ten Thousand Years?
I own excellent English translations of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey. The poems were composed roughly three thousand years ago, then passed down orally through the generations before they were written down at all.
While attributed to Homer, it's unclear that there ever was such a person; quite likely, whoever passed on a poem, added his or her own material.
There are many translations available; I selected the one that makes the most sense to modern Americans. The cover of Illiad depicts the Normandy Invasion from inside a troop carrier; Oddyssey's has the Earthrise as seen from Apollo XIII.
These two poems are the very foundations of Western Civilation.
We all hope that there will be some kind of civilization ten thousand years from now. What are we doing, to contribute to its foundation?
11 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] threadA counter to my future world with very high quality but slowly changing software would be the advent of strong AI. I can't imagine strong AI that would not quickly, robustly, and continuously rewrite itself in a safe sandbox then rapid redeployment scenario.
MULTICS came pretty close to that. It's commonly thought that UNIX was so-named to ridicule MULTICS. In reality, the people who developed UNIX contributed to MULTICS, it's just that they wanted something fun and easy to work on after having worded so hard and so long on MULTICS.
It was written in the mid-sixties. The last MULTICS box was decommissioned in Halifax, I think in 2005 or so.
Quite a lot of what we regard as new, in today's operating systems, was implemented in MULTICS in the sixties.
Primes ran MULTICS.
The Iliad and the Odyssey survived because for most of the intervening centuries educated people (i) revered the relative sophistication of the Classical civilisations and (ii) relatively little else considered of value was written for most of the intervening years. It would be quite sad if people of the next few millennia feel the same way about the output of the early 21st century Anglosphere, particularly if its unsurpassed technical achievements rather than cultural output that's the object of their reverence.
Just look to other sciences (biology, chemistry etc), we look back 200+ years and find that solutions to seemingly impossible problems were known all along but that some factor we needed to make it successful just didn't exist yet (a Tony Stark moment). Today we take it for granted I think in some cases that in the past 15 years we can do things with GPU's, DSP's etc that just 30 or so years ago were thought to be near insurmountable problems to solve in our lifetime.