contemplating making this really simple regex stop matching dates after year 2999 just cause I think it might be funny and ruin someone's day for a few minutes long after I'm dead.

You will be pissed at you when they transfer your consciousness to a chip and you are forced to use your code for eternity.

You think any software will last for a thousand years? 😂

@Lensflare Other than DNA?

@Demolishun huh?

@Lensflare DNA is code that has been around millions or maybe even billions of years. Its just hardware level code.

@Demolishun Hardware level code... Is not Software. Dude, it's literally in the name

@Lensflare a dev from the next millennium will read your comment and become sad

@Demolishun maybe. But the average dev can be considered lucky if his software will be used for at least 20 years. And the average TTL of SW will probably decrease in the future.

@ScriptCoded it's all relative. If you have the tools to (re)program hardware, whatever you write in it becomes software.

@electrineer "reading? You mean the thing that cavemen did back in the days?"
- a dev from the next millenium

@ScriptCoded I think it may be more wetware though.

@Demolishun I don't know, sounds like fluidware to me

@electrineer

dev1: I have a pull request for you. Pull my finger.

dev2: That ain't your finger.

You should make it ten years later. Nobody will use your software in another 50 years, not to mention 1000 years.

Frameworks and techs evolve fast.

This is the only way to reliability guarantee that your code will still be used in 977 years. Probably both the language and the OS you're developing for will be long gone, your code will exist as a supporting library within a big blob that wraps a Linux VM which is impossible to modify because no C compilers have been developed for any hardware in the last 100 years.

IBM still maintains backwards compatibility with an architecture that couldn't index more than 16MB of memory.