It is kind of tragic when so much work gets wrapped into libraries coded in obscure languages, and so never gets out to affect much in the world.
Doubtless, enormous brilliance went into Symbolics OS and UI code, all washed away when Symbolics tanked. On the up side, untold gigabytes of bad Java code were flushed in the big tech meltdown of 2000. When Twitter and Facebook go flat like inflatable lawn decorations in a cold snap, will much of anything be lost? (Anyway zstd and lz4 will survive.) How much stuff is coded in Wolfram?
Obscure code today goes onto GitHub repositories rather that just evaporating, but it is more manual labor to find and transcribe to a live language than can usually be mustered.
Doubtless, enormous brilliance went into Symbolics OS and UI code, all washed away when Symbolics tanked. On the up side, untold gigabytes of bad Java code were flushed in the big tech meltdown of 2000. When Twitter and Facebook go flat like inflatable lawn decorations in a cold snap, will much of anything be lost? (Anyway zstd and lz4 will survive.) How much stuff is coded in Wolfram?
Obscure code today goes onto GitHub repositories rather that just evaporating, but it is more manual labor to find and transcribe to a live language than can usually be mustered.