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.
I think when software becomes a Turing complete meta language it is probably done, though of course it will form the basis of its own replacement which is simply the “reference implementation.”
Mild disagree. Most spreadsheets are Turing complete, especially if they have one or more built in programming languages and have been for decades at this point, yet new “must have” features seem to get added to Excel with every release. Or that was the case until the recent “Office is no longer Office” debacle anyway.
And programming languages themselves keep updating and changing.