Knuth had actually this &quot;it should last&quot; goal as he designed TeX:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scicomp.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;3462&#x2F;increasing-the-archival-longevity-of-code" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scicomp.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;3462&#x2F;increasing-t...</a><p>“Ever since those beginnings in 1977, the TeX research project that I embarked on was driven by two major goals. The first goal was quality: we wanted to produce documents that were not just nice, but actually the best. (…) The second major goal was <i>archival: to create systems that would be independent of changes in printing technology as much as possible. When the next generation of printing devices came along, I wanted to be able to retain the same quality already achieved, instead of having to solve all the problems anew. I wanted to design something that would be still usable in 100 years.</i> ” – Donald E. Knuth: Digital Typography, p. 559 (quoted from <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TeX" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TeX</a> )<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TeX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TeX</a><p>&quot;Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the &quot;absolutely final change (to be made after my death)&quot; will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.[11] &quot;