[OT] Eternal programming

[Michal Wallace]

On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Roman Suzi wrote:
 
> I want to be 100% sure that some things I use today will stay forever.
> My main concerns are:

Hey Roman,

You've got an interesting idea here.. But I'm not sure I understand
the problem it's meant to address. If you're worried about your code
suddenly ceasing to work, of course you know that code doesn't break
unless you change things. A pyhon 0.1 script would work just fine
today if you had python 0.1 installed.

So it must be that you want your programs to keep working even as you
keep changing the underlying libraries / languages, or upgrading to
new versions that other people create.

If that's the case, you can defend against this problem by writing
unit tests. If you have a test for every feature of your program,
you're free to upgrade any libraries it uses. Just run the tests and
you'll find out instantly if anything broke. If something did break,
you can either update your code, or just go back to the old version of
the library.

Cheers,

- Michal
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