[Falkon1313]

Over the course of my learning and my career, I've kind of gone back and forth on this a bit.

On the one hand, software is like a living thing. Once you bring it into this world, you need to nurture it and care for it, because its needs, and the environment around it, and the people who use it, are constantly changing and evolving. This is a beautiful sentiment.

On the other hand, it's really nice to just be done with something. To have it completed, finished, move on to something else. And still be able to use the thing you built two or three decades later and have it work just fine.

The sheer drudgery of maintenance and porting and constant updates and incompatibilities sucks my will to live. I could be creating something new, building something else, improving something, instead, I'm stuck here doing CPR on everything that I have to keep alive.

I'm leaning more and more toward things that will stand on their own in the long-term. Stable. Done. Boring. Lasting. You can always come back and add or fix something if you want. But you don't have to lose sleep just keeping it alive. You can relax and go do other things.

I feel like we've put ourselves in a weird predicament with that.

I can't help but think of Super Star Trek, originally written in the 1970s on a mainframe, based on a late 1960s program (the original mainframe Star Trek), I think. It was ported to DOS in the 1990s and still runs fine today. There's not a new release every two weeks. Doesn't need to be. Just a typo or bugfix every few years. And they're not that big a deal. -- https://almy.us/sst.html

I think that's more what we should be striving for. If someone reports a rare bug after 50 years, sure, fix it and make a new release. The rest of your time, you can be doing other stuff.