Post #2189096
2026-04-03 23:17 UTC
@jacob@social.jacobian.org @glyph@mastodon.social There's a story about bridge maintenance where the gist was that by the time one pass of repainting the support structure was complete, it was time to start the next pass. Road maintenance is another brutally expensive (and unrelenting) activity. So "build for maintenance" isn't just a software thing - it's something that software inherited from physical engineering, where making the most likely to wear out pieces easy to replace makes a big difference in maintenance costs.
Replies (1)
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@ancoghlan@mastodon.social 2026-04-03 23:24
@jacob@social.jacobian.org @glyph@mastodon.social The equivalent of "rusting" in software is "the assumptions about the world encoded in a piece of software will inevitably become incorrect". Whether that matters or not depends on the software (even games are often described as having "dated" graphics or interface design, let alone software that actively supports or integrates with institutional processes or other software systems). YOLOing the original construction definitely makes software decay faster, though.