For protocols to be resilient, they must be maintained. Simple tools can be interrogated. Simple tools can be tweaked. Worse is better.
Software must be executed on a substrate, a computational abstraction on top of hardware. If that substrate shifts from under the software, the software stops running. It must be “ported” to new hardware via a new abstraction. Longevity thus implies constant maintenance.
The easier to port, the more resilient software becomes. Sometimes porting becomes impossible, and then software dies. This is what happened to Adobe Flash, until it was ported to the internet browser (flash.pm). Choosing a simple abstraction on top of hardware, despite being inefficient is often worth it. This is the approach taken by www⁄100 rabbits with Uxn. They write:
“As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness, designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain. We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around building playful audio/visual experiences.
Uxn was created explicitly to host software on pre-existing platforms, the design was advised primarily by relative software complexity, not by how fast it could run on new hardware standards. Features were weighted against the relative difficulty they would add for programmers implementing their own emulators.”