* Writing code that lasts a hundred years
Writing code that lasts a hundred years! I first heard about this concept from Mike Mathew of "Text-Em All" of Frisco, TX which I thought was very interesting. I could not find any references to hundred year programs when googling, but have recently found the proper terminology is "future proofing" that obviously has a less ambitious goal. I did not connect the US Gen Web (a genealogy website) that I volunteer on to the hundred year program, but that is essentially their goal. US Gen Web decided years ago to do static websites of just HTML and later added CSS. US Gen Web said everything would be text files and not MS-Word or other program specific docs. Pictures were to be in only prevailing web formats. We had the advantage that the data was considered public (fully open to read access), so no need of user authentication. We had the advantage that the data was stateless meaning the users could not change the data. The only program was ...