The art of knowing when to quit
One of the most nonsensical things I have read on here in a long time.<p>Software is not like a tv show or a stand up comedy set or an album. It is not a cultural artifact. It is machinery.<p>We don’t really get bored of a bread slicer. A school bus does not become tiresome. “My french press, it lacks its initial spark!”<p>Machines break, or fall behind evolving requirements (e.g. the bus only takes leaded gas). These are <i>functional</i> shortcomings. The idea of somehow withdrawing a functional useful piece of software from society does not make much sense. There are copies out there, first of all. What are you going to do, hunt them all down? You can stop maintaining it but in many cases, you can’t even prevent other people from working on it. Do you think even Larry Ellison could kill the Oracle database?