Last month, I turned 51, which isn’t that old for a human. I’ll hopefully live a lot longer, but even now, my uptime is better than any computational system.

The closest I can come to finding something as old as me is Voyager. If you take away Voyager, I don’t even know if 2nd place is more than ten years old. It’s probably a TV.

Unlike anything we make today, Voyager was designed from the beginning to have a long-life. The design brief said: “Don’t make engineering choices that could limit the lifetime of the space craft”. This led the engineers to make extensive use of redundancy and reconfigurability.

For more details, check out this presentation of the design of Voyager by Aaron Cummings.

In the 40+ (and still counting) years that Voyager has been running, having redundancies and being reconfigurable has extended its life and capabilities.

And it hasn’t hurt one bit that the software is not “type-safe”, “late-binding”, or “functional”. It doesn’t make use of a dependency framework, design patterns, or an IO monad. It is not declarative—it’s probably not even structural. None of these things contributed to its long life.

This is why I find many of the arguments over software development paradigms so boring. None of it has resulted in anything like Voyager, and even that hasn’t been replicated to even a minimal extent. In all of our big systems, the adaptability comes from the people still working on it. If we stopped maintaining these systems, they’d stop working.

The only upside is that our AI overlords will probably only run for a month or two before crashing on unexpected input.