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In the Node & JavaScript ecosystem, there is the web framework Express. The current major version 4.x.x branch is over 10 years old [1]. And yet it powers so many apps in the ecosystem (over 17M downloads every week [2]). It lacks some features and is not the most performant [3]. But me and coworkers I talked with, like it because it allows for quick, stable development and long-term planning without worrying about drastic API changes and lack of security patches for older versions. Even better stability is provided with languages like Go where you can run over 10-year-old programs thanks to the promise of compatibility. [4]
[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/express?activeTab=versions
[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/express
[3] https://fastify.dev/benchmarks/
[4] https://go.dev/doc/go1compat
Most of the software I write is at least somewhat cold-blooded by this definition. My program to find the dictionary forms of Finnish words is an okay example:
https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem
I wrote the initial draft in an afternoon almost a year ago, and from then on endeavored to only make changes which I know play nicely with my local software ecology. I usually have `fzf` installed, so an interactive mode comes as a shell script. I usually have `csvkit`, `jq`, and if all else fails `awk` installed, so my last major update was to include flags for CSV, JSON, and TSV output respectively. Etc, etc.
The build instructions intentionally eschew anything like Poetry and just gives you the shell commands I would run on a fresh Ubuntu VirtualBox VM. I hand test it every couple of months in this environment. If the need to Dockerize it ever arose I'm sure it would be straightforward, in part because the shell commands themselves are straightforward.
I disagree. Tiny libraries can be fine indefinitely. For example this little library which inverts a promise in JavaScript.
I haven’t touched this in years and it still works fine. I could come in and update the version of the dependencies but I don’t need to, and that’s a good thing.
https://github.com/josephg/resolvable
Great article. I try to follow this advice as much as I can. My personal website (https://www.jviotti.com) runs almost purely on well established UNIX tools like Make, Pandoc, Sed, etc. Repository here: https://github.com/jviotti/website.