I’m talking about programs that can’t be improved no matter what. They do exactly what they’re supposed to and will never be changed.
It’ll probably have to be something small, like cd or pwd, but does such a program exist?
For software to be perfect, can not be improved no matter what, you’d have to define a very specific and narrow scope and evaluate against that.
Environments change, text and data encoding and content changes, forms and protocol of input and output changes, opportunities and wishes to integrate or extend change.
pwdseems simple enough.cdI would already say no, with opportunities to remember folders, support globbing, fuzzy matching, history, virtual filesystems. Many of those depend on the environment you’re in. Typically, shells handle globbing. There’s alternativecdtools that do fuzzy matching and history, and virtual filesystems are usually abstracted away. But things change. And I would certainly like an interactive and fuzzy cd.Now, if you define it’s scope, you can say: “All that other stuff is out of scope. It’s perfect within it’s defined target scope.” But I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for? It certainly doesn’t mean it can’t be improved no matter what.
Htop
emacs can only be improved no matter what but it should count
I wanted to say VLC because to me, it’s the gold standard of fully working open-source software that just destroys the commercial competitors.
But it’s not perfect only because society changes. New video formats forces VLC and open-source devs to adapt. Bigger video and new tech specs require VLC to update. If it wasn’t for all those external needs, VLC would be perfect.
Did I also mentioned the many times rich companies wanted to buy VLC and they laughed?
Idk if it’s perfect but I really like the “literate programming” version of `
This is not the original, but here is one version of it : https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate/blob/master/examples/wc.lit
Your sentence abruptly ends in a backtick - did you mean to include something more? Maybe “
wc”?
A program that just prints “Hello World” to the screen and quits.
…that supports Unicode? Which encodings? Or only ASCII? Unicode continues to change.
I wouldn’t be very confident that it won’t change or offer reasonable opportunities for improvement.
mcmaster.com is pretty close…
Do you exclude inventory management from that “will never change” so that that’s only about software?
I imagine there will be new products to be listed.
Does IRC count ?
The original one? Because there’s numerous extensions to it. I wouldn’t be confident it won’t evolve further.
Didn’t IRC have major insecurity issues?
I can’t remember why IRC died.
Winamp! It probably had some bugs or security issues but functional it was perfect imo.
There was a moment in time where maybe it was qmail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail
Ten years after the launch of qmail 1.0, and at a time when more than a million of the Internet’s SMTP servers ran either qmail or netqmail, only four known bugs had been found in the qmail 1.0 releases, and no security issues.
More on how it was accomplished:
https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/
Djbdns was excellent too, and ezmlm,.in fact all DJB’s software was quality for its single purpose. The world moved on though, and you had to have your basic Internet servers just…do more
Honestly, it all starts going to shite after “hello world.”
Shouldn’t it be “Hello world.”?
No. “Hello, world!” or you’re doing it wrong.
What does perfect hello world even mean? It can be realized in many ways and none is the best way.
Computers can’t even greet you in the real world. Its like some kind of sick joke.
“Dance, clanker! Dance!”
Hahahahah
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TeX. Best documented source, and last bug found was 12 years ago.
The 2021 release of Tex included several bug-fixes, so not quite 12 years:
https://tug.org/texmfbug/tuneup21bugs.html
See also the following list of potential bugs, that may be included in the planned 2029 release of Tex:
https://tug.org/texmfbug/newbug.html
That said, Tex is still an impressive piece of software
Thanks for the update, I somehow missed that.
To be honest, they didn’t make it easy to find
wget.
7zip?
7zip has had few CVEs and vulnerabilities
It’s on Github and has several PRs.
It was fault tolerant but I wouldn’t say it was perfect. There were plenty of “known issues”, and the fix in production was basically, “don’t do that”.
