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From the phys.org article:
As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. That is why today DARPA announced it will launch an ambitious four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years.
The Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS, program seeks to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon and environments in which they operate. Such advances will necessitate the development of new linguistic abstractions, formal methods, and resource-aware program analyses to discover and specify program transformations, as well as systems designed to monitor changes in the surrounding digital ecosystem. The program is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability.
DARPA's press release and call for research proposals.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lentilla on Friday April 10 2015, @12:28PM
If you are designing a toilet, you may design it to last a hundred years ( *especially* if YOU are the one who is going to have to fix the thing if it leaks! )
There is a fundamental difference between those who build toilets and those that count beans. The "builders" create things that are used by other people - they build one toilet today, and it get used tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. The "counters"; on the other hand; do some counting today, they do some more counting tomorrow, and so on. The fundamental difference is that a "builder" creates something to perform a function whereas the "counter" only performs a function. That's why toilets last a while whereas the quarterly report only lasts to next quarter.
I'm probably a bit biased and fit in the "builder" category - any time I repeat a function I'm accumulating notes on how to automate it.
its a "tragedy of the commons" thing
Perhaps not. Perhaps it's just a different mindset. There is a large proportion of the population to whom "good enough" is indistinguishable to them from "properly done" - as long as the answer or result is what is required the path taken to arrive there is not important.