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?

  • BrightCandle@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Pretty certain cd and pwd have changed over the years. The kernel hasn’t remained the same so the commands that use it wont and now we have faster methods to do various things like getting file data the commands that depend on it will change. Less quickly than something that is still gaining features but bit rot is a very real effect since every single part of software is in constant flux.

    • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      2 months ago

      Ehhh, for curl there is a few features they’re working on (like better websocket support), and I’m sure there’s lots of optimizations that could be made, given how complex a project it is…

  • lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com
    0·
    2 months ago

    Windows event viewer… You open it, go to the toilet, to the shower, take a coffee, … and only 2 more minutes later, it shows you the entries…

    It’s so perfect, they never had to improve it in decades.

    /s

  • somegeek@programming.dev
    0·
    2 months ago

    I would say git, tex, sqlite, Clojure, Steel banks common lisp are some of the candidates.

    Perfect doesn’t meen “not any bugs fixes or features needed” to me. I can’t really define what it means to me…

  • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    2 months 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
      0·
      2 months 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.

  • ellen@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

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

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    2 months 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.

    • ehxor@lemmy.ca
      0·
      2 months ago

      This was going to be my point. The idea that as the software slowly makes new releases the version number more and more closely approximates Pi

    • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

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

    • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      2 months 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.

  • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    2 months 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?

      • grue@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        TeX will be perfect after Knuth dies and the version number is incremented to π.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      ugh, no way. It might do a fine job with typesetting, but the user experience is utterly awful and that’s very unlikely to change because of design choices over 40+ years. If you don’t think so, give typst a real try.