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.
They say LaTex is done so the version number approach pi. Everytime they update it they get closer to pi
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
That’s TeX, not LaTeX.
Don Knuth (who originally wrote TeX) had a real obsession with perfection. He even thought he could pay exponentially increasing awards to people who found errors in his books.
He eventually stopped doing that because he wasn’t as perfect as he thought he was. Still way off the charts compared to the average person, though.
So perfect that everyone uses TeX, and no successors to it were ever developed.
At some point the bugs are features.
“All observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.”
That someone will eventually be a hacker.
İmportant distinction: TeX is considered “perfect software” IIRC while LaTeX has evolved over time (or was still evolving when I last used it in the 2000s)
Wow, they took the joke much further than πthon