The Cafes » Software

This morning BBEdit reminded me it was time to upgrade to version 11, but what really caught my eye was the copyright notice in the dialog box:

Copyright Barebones Software 1992-2015.

Has it really been more than 20 years since those early freeware versions on System 7? What is it about text editors that enables them to last so long? emacs and vi are even older.

This got me thinking. What software am I still using today that I was using 20 or more years ago?
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Here’s a robots.txt file from a company whose software I’m currently evaluating:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /mantis/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /synk/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/de/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/fr/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/it/unreg.html
Disallow: /synk/email.psn
Disallow: /synk/help/

This is from a small company whose main product is experiencing solid growth. In fact, they are growing so fast, they are having trouble responding to support e-mails and are consequently requesting that users check the FAQ list and read the forums before sending them e-mail. Keeping that in mind, can you tell what’s wrong with this robots.txt?
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One of my flaws as a writer is that I say too much. I find it really hard to cut out as much as I need to. Sometimes I come up with a good turn of phrase, and I just can’t let it go. However sometimes I need to. It’s not that the sentence or paragraph itself is wrong or bad in any way. It’s just that it no longer fits into the whole fabric of the article or book. Sometimes the article or book simply needs to be shorter. Even if every single sentence is well-written and conveys valuable information, sometimes the interest of the audience dictates that you say less rather than more. It’s a rare author who can keep an audience’s interest on the Web for more than a couple of thousand words, and I’m not one of them. Sometimes you have to cut just to keep the size down.

Software development is much the same. (more…)