I’m talking about programs that can’t be improved no matter what. They do exactly what they’re supposed to and will never be changed.

It’ll probably have to be something small, like cd or pwd, but does such a program exist?

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    TeX?

    Development is considered to be complete, and the version numbering is just adding a digit of pi. Last change was 5 years ago.

  • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
    7·
    6 hours ago

    I wanted to say VLC because to me, it’s the gold standard of fully working open-source software that just destroys the commercial competitors.

    But it’s not perfect only because society changes. New video formats forces VLC and open-source devs to adapt. Bigger video and new tech specs require VLC to update. If it wasn’t for all those external needs, VLC would be perfect.

    Did I also mentioned the many times rich companies wanted to buy VLC and they laughed?

  • KissakiEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    For software to be perfect, can not be improved no matter what, you’d have to define a very specific and narrow scope and evaluate against that.

    Environments change, text and data encoding and content changes, forms and protocol of input and output changes, opportunities and wishes to integrate or extend change.

    pwd seems simple enough. cd I would already say no, with opportunities to remember folders, support globbing, fuzzy matching, history, virtual filesystems. Many of those depend on the environment you’re in. Typically, shells handle globbing. There’s alternative cd tools that do fuzzy matching and history, and virtual filesystems are usually abstracted away. But things change. And I would certainly like an interactive and fuzzy cd.

    Now, if you define it’s scope, you can say: “All that other stuff is out of scope. It’s perfect within it’s defined target scope.” But I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for? It certainly doesn’t mean it can’t be improved no matter what.

    • ne0phyte@feddit.org
      1·
      2 hours ago

      If you just need the functionality then fzf does (among other things) exactly that. Interactive fuzzy cd. If you use the shell bindings you can do cd foo/bar/**<tab> to get a recursive fuzzy matching or you can do alt+c to immediately find any subdirectory and directly cd into it upon pressing enter. You can also use Ctrl+T to find and insert a path into the prompt.

    • KissakiEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      …that supports Unicode? Which encodings? Or only ASCII? Unicode continues to change.

      I wouldn’t be very confident that it won’t change or offer reasonable opportunities for improvement.

    • KissakiEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Your sentence abruptly ends in a backtick - did you mean to include something more? Maybe “wc”?

    • KissakiEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Do you exclude inventory management from that “will never change” so that that’s only about software?

      I imagine there will be new products to be listed.

  • ellen@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    10 hours ago

    Winamp! It probably had some bugs or security issues but functional it was perfect imo.

    • KissakiEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      The original one? Because there’s numerous extensions to it. I wouldn’t be confident it won’t evolve further.

  • IanTwenty@piefed.socialEnglish
    20·
    22 hours ago

    There was a moment in time where maybe it was qmail:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail

    Ten years after the launch of qmail 1.0, and at a time when more than a million of the Internet’s SMTP servers ran either qmail or netqmail, only four known bugs had been found in the qmail 1.0 releases, and no security issues.

    More on how it was accomplished:

    https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/

    • kalpol@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Djbdns was excellent too, and ezmlm,.in fact all DJB’s software was quality for its single purpose. The world moved on though, and you had to have your basic Internet servers just…do more

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
      12·
      19 hours ago

      It was fault tolerant but I wouldn’t say it was perfect. There were plenty of “known issues”, and the fix in production was basically, “don’t do that”.