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Choosing a platform for a long-term project

I just posted a question about whether WPF is a good choice for a long-term project , and it made me think about developing long-term projects.

If you need to choose a technology (language / environment / framework) for a project that is expected to last for many years (at least 10), what would you choose? What technologies that we take for granted today are expected to disappear in 3-5 years?

Will C # exist in 10 years? Will be Ruby? Will the Python interpreter still run Python 3.0 code after 5 years?

What would you choose? Whatever you definitely choose?

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Linking your project to C # is about as risky as linking it to Windows, i.e. Not really.

Windows will not disappear overnight, no matter what happens, preventing events of extinction level.

It’s also hard to say, because it just depends on the project you are developing. The likelihood that something is developed now and requires absolutely no maintenance or modification for the next 10+ years is ... remote.

But look at the difference between 10 and 10 years ago:

  • Java was about 10 years ago, but those JDKs (1.0 / 1.1) have long been EOLed, and these applications will require an update to work with Java 5+ (current minimum supported JDK);
  • Applications written in C / C ++ for the Win32 API are probably still mostly OK, although Vista (and to a lesser extent 2000 / XP) did break some things that worked fine on Win95 / 98. However, DOS games of that era (for example), as a rule, still work on emulators;
  • Perl still exists and remains on version 5;
  • There are several COBOL applications that have been running for decades, although there is virtually no chance that any of them took 10 years unchanged.

So I really don’t know what you expect. The software is live breath. If you do not feed him and do not support him, he dies. What should bother you is a catastrophic change (for example, if you put the farm on the success of BeOS, for example), and everything related to Windows or Linux will be fine. Java, .Net and Python will still be (I would bet). But help will be needed.

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The more people invest in technology, the more likely it is to survive. However, a lot of VB developers were annoyed when the classic VB was discontinued and VB.net was not compatible with VB6.

Personally, I would bet on Java. But it is all the same.

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