this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
625 points (99.1% liked)

Programmer Humor

31949 readers
1128 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
all 47 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 81 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If you're talking about applications that can be made to act how their namesake predecessors did 30 years ago, sure. The Unix mindset is all about that.

But don't be fooled into thinking that anything on a modern Unix-like system hasn't been modified, patched or rewritten from scratch at some point in the last 30 years. More than once. Even /bin/false has a changelog.

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 63 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Slightly pedantic, but according to core-utils GitHub, false.c has not been changed in 21 years. But true.c, which is what false.c is based on, has been changed as recent as 4 months ago.

~I couldn’t resist looking it up, and found the results mildly interesting.~

[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 33 points 1 month ago (1 children)

you mispelled super interesting

[–] zergtoshi@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago

You misspelled misspell 🤪

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago

#define AUTHORS proper_name ("Jim Meyering")

The true author, so to speak.

[–] Redjard@reddthat.com 4 points 1 month ago

Most changes are updating the copyright year.
After that, it's pretty much (or maybe completely, I haven't checked exhaustively) for the --help and --version flags, not for the core part of exiting with a certain exit code.

[–] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 4 points 1 month ago

It is committed long-term maintenance that separates a road from a desire pathway.

It is committed long-term maintenance that eventually makes software solid enough to be someone else's substrate.

/bombast

[–] SatyrSack@quokk.au 62 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 30 points 1 month ago (1 children)

yeah, I bet there was a bunch of crap written 30y ago too, the difference was no npm or github

[–] Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Not quite 30 yet but maven was released 2004 and still going strong.

[–] AAA@feddit.org 30 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Survivorship bias. We only see the "good old programs" because the bad ones didn't make it until now.

[–] Stitch0815@feddit.org 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes

And while not exactly applicable for the computer example but generally everytime this example is brought up

ROMANS DID NOT HAVE 40 FUCKING TON TRUCKS

Much less so 100s per hour

Roman infrastructure was/is impressive no doubt

But not that impressive

[–] mkwt@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, the damage curve is exponential by axle weight.

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago

Not quite, but fourth power may as well be.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Sure, but we have been running the same Linux command line tools now for the 30 years ive been on Linux. None of them have had any noticable bugs and none of them have been replaced, until maybe now recently with some rust versions that are still not default.

They are incredibly actually. We dont have that in software engineering anymore. We add features and bloat to all modern software until it needs to be replaced.

[–] trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf 6 points 1 month ago

Kind of sad isn't it? I had some lengthy discussions with someone who worked for Atari in the 70s/80s and the amount of magic they worked with limited hardware was something else.. Sadly I was a young drunk and don't remember much of what he said.

[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago

Nah. The dumpster fire known as gcc still survived until this day.

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Good point. Same thing with music for example.

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] marcos@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What are you guys doing to your JS packages for them to last so long?

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

No using in production, I guess

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That Roman road is in absolute shit condition. It used to have 2 more layers on top of those rocks, a gravel layer and a stone block finish.

[–] Soapbox@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

That Roman road also didn't have thousands of multi-ton vehicles rolling over it every day.

[–] enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 month ago

That javascript hole was probably caused by a bicycle.

[–] DahGangalang@infosec.pub 5 points 1 month ago

Yeah, so not ideal, but still workable despite being built off ancient technology in an ancient time.

[–] Deftworks@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Who spilled the 55 gallon drum of sulfuric acid out front, and "forgot" to clean it up?

[–] PartyAt15thAndSummit@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I suppose there was a big fire. Sulfuric acid would have eaten the steel reinforcement, leaving the asphalt alone, more or less.

[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 month ago

COBOL system written 50 years ago...JS package at release.

[–] ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 month ago

I watched whole videos about repaving with used bricks and why we don't do that for all low-speed roads globally is just beyond me.

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I'm an old-school JavaScript developer, that's why I use Angular!

[–] Spider89@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] aaaaaaaaargh@feddit.org 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

that's a blast from the past I want to forget.

ajax was such a bitch

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago
[–] UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] ApertureUA@lemmy.today 2 points 1 month ago

time_t is in libc headers, just rebuild and good to go

[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

30 months!??!? Are you trying to get hacked?

[–] what@beehaw.org 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

We should dig up our roads to use as fuel while we're at it

[–] raman_klogius@ani.social 1 points 1 month ago

The only time climate change is helping us with that, by heating up the air so much the asphalt melts.

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah accurate. I got a few node projects and more rust projects. The few node projects get more security vulnerability than the rust ones. And most time it's just OpenSSL and rustls, which is kinda expected from such important packages

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

Really, that's some well-crafted street.

[–] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Software quality apocalypse continues to worse ( the bar was already low )

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

And now they are being released 100x faster by AI