Microsoft’s original source code

Flipping through the source code is like a time machine tour of tech's evolution over the past 50 years. It made me wonder: will our 2025 code look as ancient by 2075?

And, btw, great infographics within the post.

Has there ever been a moment in human history where we’ve (as a society, not as individuals) looked back and were envious?

So my money is that the code I wrote today is the joke of tomorrow - for all involved.

Also, I for one don’t want to go back to punch cards ;)

> Has there ever been a moment in human history where we’ve (as a society, not as individuals) looked back and were envious?

I am guessing that generation that transitioned from Pax Romana to early middle ages in Europe.

That's interesting to consider. Some of the GNU code is getting quite old and looking through it is a blast from the past. I'm frankly amazed that it continues to work so well. I suspect there is a relatively small group of GNU hackers out there rocking gray and white beards that are silently powering the foundations of our modern world, and I worry what's going to happen when they start retiring. Maybe we'll get rust rewrites of everything and a new generation will take over, but frankly I'm pretty worried about it.

I think to most (90+%?) software developers out their in the world, Assembler might as well be hieroglyphics. They/we can guess at the concepts involved of course, but actually being able to read the code end to end, and have a mental model of what is happening is not really going to happen. Not without some sort of Rosetta Stone. (Comments :) )

I think 2075 developers will feel the same way about modern Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

They will think of themselves as software developers but they won't be writing code the same way, they'll be giving guided instructions to much higher level tools (perhaps AIs that themselves have a provenance back to modern LLMs)

Just as today there will still be those that need to write low level critical code. There are still lots of people today that have to write Assembler, though end up expressing it via C or Rust. And there will be people still working on AI technology. But even those will be built off other AI's.

I doubt that since knowledge and education wasn’t wide spread - beyond cloisters, people didn’t general know how well the Romans had it.

Remember it took until the Renaissance until ancient texts (Greek and Roman) were “rediscovered” by European scholars.

In all their cities they could see buildings that they did not know how to build. And before that, public services would have broken down. It would have become impossible to find people who knew how to repair your heated floor (if you were rich), etc. The city of Rome declined from 1 million people to something like 20,000. In the late 500s, Pope Gregory the Great thought that the world was ending because of all the trouble (including vicious barbarian invasions). Monks (and presumably anyone educated) had access to a lot of ancient texts, it was only some that got lost in the West. I think they would have had a distinct sense that that past was more advanced.

They’ve already retired for the most part. Stallman for example is 72.